European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as BLACKcelebrated last Sunday 30th anniversary of the release of the World Wide Web (WWW) into the public domainan event that was the definitive starting signal for the medium with which we interact with the Internet.

The fatherhood of the World Wide Web is attributed to the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who began in 1989 to design a general model of information management around the experiments that were (and are) carried out at CERN. The original intention was to create a management system that would allow scientists and institutions around the world working with CERN data to share information accurately and quickly. In other words, the original intention was much more modest, and Tim Berners-Lee was unaware that he was changing the world forever.

The work started by Tim Berners-Lee managed to garner a lot of interest within CERN, so attention began to be paid elsewhere. The structure around the web had around 50 HTTP servers in January 1993, and on the same day Mosaic, the first web browser, was released. On April 30, 1993, CERN decided to release the World Wide Web into the public domain.with a structure that consisted of a server part, another that acts as a client, and a code library.

As standards around copyright licenses were still in their early stages of development, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in making the World Wide Web public, released the following via a document: “CERN disclaims all intellectual property rights in this code, both in source and binary form, and to anyone permission is granted to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it.”

Tim Berners-Lee.

As the concept and model of open source took shape during the 1990s, another version of the software was released in 1994 under an open source license instead of public domain. The effect of this move is that CERN retained the copyright but allowed anyone to freely use and modify the site.

Despite the reversal in 1994, Walter Hoogland, one of the co-signatories of the document that proclaimed the liberation of the site, did not hesitate to confirm that “Most people would agree that going public was the best thing we could have done and that it was the source of the success of the World Wide Web.“. In fact, the release as public domain in 1993 was the real starting signal for the web to have its current form, which was reflected not only in the improvement of the transfer of information within CERN, but also in the benefit to society in general.

On October 1, 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was born., which is essentially an institution that defines web standards, founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who still runs it today. The English scientist founded the W3C under the auspices of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), just after leaving his job at CERN.

Although the World Wide Web began operating in 1989, few doubt that its release into the public domain in 1993 was the true starting point for the medium that eventually brought the Internet to the entire world.