Back at CERN

We got the band back together.

In September of 2013, I had the great pleasure and privilege of going to CERN with a bunch of very smart people. I’m not sure how I managed to slip by. We were there to recreate the experience of using the line-mode browser. As I wrote at the time:

Just to be clear, the line-mode browser wasn’t the world’s first web browser. That honour goes to Tim Berners-Lee’s WorldWideWeb programme. But whereas WorldWideWeb only ran on NeXT machines, the line-mode browser worked cross-platform and was, therefore, instrumental in demonstrating the power of the web as a universally-accessible medium.

In the run-up to the 30th anniversary of the original (vague but exciting) proposal for what would become the World Wide Web, we’ve been invited back to try to recreate the experience of using that first web browser, the one that one ever ran on NeXT machines.

I missed the first day due to travel madness—flying back from Interaction 19 in Seattle during snowmageddon to Heathrow and then to Geneva—but by the time I arrived, my hackmates had already made a great start in identifying the objectives:

1. Give people an understanding of the user experience of the WorldWideWeb browser.
2. Demonstrate that a read/write philosophy was there from the beginning.
3. Give context—what was going on at the time?

That second point is crucial. WorldWideWeb wasn’t just a web browser; it was a browser/editor. That’s by far the biggest change in terms of the original vision of the web and what we ended up getting from Mosaic onwards.

Remy is working hard on the first point. He documented the first day and now on the second day, he’s made enormous progress already.

I’m focusing on point number three. I want to show the historical context for the World Wide Web. Here’s my plan…

Seeing as we’re coming up on the thirtieth anniversary, I thought it would be interesting to take the year of the proposal (1989) and look back in a time cone of thirty years previous to that at the influences on Tim Berners-Lee. I also want to look at what has happened with the web in the thirty years since the proposal. So the date of the proposal will be a centre point, with the timespan of 1959-1989 converging on it from the past, and the timespan of 1989-2019 diverging from it into the future. I hope it could make for a nice visualisation. Maybe I could try to get it look like data from a particle collision.

We’re here till the weekend and everyone else has already made tremendous progress. Kimberly has been hacking the Gibson …well, that’s what it looked like when she was deep in the code of the NeXT machine we’ve borrowed from Musée Bolo (merci beaucoup!).

We took a little time out for a tour of the data centre. Oh, and at lunch time, we sat with Robert Cailliau and grilled him with questions about the birth of the web. Quite a day!

Now it’s time for me to hit the hay and prepare for another day of hacking in this extraordinary place.

1990: Programming the World Wide Web – Web Development History

Ah, this brings back memories of hacking on the WorldWideWeb project at CERN!

(Not the original one. I’m not that old. I mean the recreation.)

Jeremy Keith & Remy Sharp - How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days on Vimeo

Here’s the talk that Remy and I gave at Fronteers in Amsterdam, all about our hack week at CERN. We’re both really pleased with how this turned out and we’d love to give it again!

Public Affairs Office on Instagram

A little teaser from U.S. MIssion at the U.N. in Geneva:

This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the birth of the #WorldWideWeb. A team of #webdevelopers are working to make it possible for the public to experience the #FirstWebBrowser as it looked on #TimBernersLees’s computer @CERN…

WWW: Where’s the Writable Web?

Prompted by our time at CERN, Remy ponders why web browsers (quite quickly) diverged from the original vision of being read/write software.

First Web browser revived during hackathon - YouTube

This is the lovely little film about our WorldWideWeb hack project. It was shown yesterday at CERN during the Web@30 celebrations. That was quite a special moment.