Growing up, when my mum wanted to teach me a lesson about arrogance, she would tell me about the first time she used the World Wide Web. It was the mid-90s, and she was working for an international company that was trying out the new technology relatively early. As the website slowly loaded, she listened to the dial-up tone and waited... and waited… before loudly declaring to the office “well, this will never take off”.
By 2000, when she had me, the Web had already proved her wrong. I would grow up in a world that was slowly forgetting a time before they had so much information at their fingertips. Many around me had already forgotten – if indeed they ever knew - how the Web was first spun, a process started by computer programmer Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the late 1980s.
Spinning For Science
Now home to the Large Hadron Collider, CERN was by then already a large international organisation – a collaboration between about 10, 000 people. Many of these researchers split their time between the Geneva laboratory and departments all over the world, including the Particle Physics Department (PPD) at Rutherford Appleton laboratory (RAL), where I work. One of my colleagues was working with Berners-Lee on his “day-job” in the Data Acquisition Group (DAQ). They were working on software which allowed remote computers to execute functions on each other, but “in the background, he was developing this cool idea called the World Wide Web.”
In Berners-Lee’s book ‘Weaving the Web’ he describes how difficult it was at the time to distribute information via CERN’s “weblike structure”. Researchers were officially and unofficially split into overlapping groups of home institutes, experiments and disciplines, with Berners-Lee recollecting “Much of the crucial information existed only in people’s heads. We learned the most in conversations at coffee at tables strategically placed in the intersection of two corridors.”
Berners-Lee wanted to make it easier for researchers to share this “crucial information” via the Internet, which despite being up and running since the 1970s, remained accessible primarily to computer experts. His book outlines how there was no one “Eureka!” moment that allowed him to invent the World Wide Web. Instead, it came about due to his “growing realisation that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way.” Having also witnessed the failed attempts of other computer scientists to impose complicated organisation systems on scientists, he realised he “would have to create a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. This meant as close as possible to no rules at all.”
In March 1989, Berners-Lee handed his proposal to the higher powers at CERN. His idea was to combine the internet, a physical network, with hypertext, computer-based text containing references (hyperlinks) to other text, creating a ‘web’ of documents. These documents are shared using a web browser – the software used for looking through the internet and displaying pages – and a web server, which provides a user with the documents they request using their web browser.
The first browser was set up by Berners-Lee using a powerful new NeXT computer. A small white label stuck to the front bore the message “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”, scrawled by a messy hand in bright red pen.
The first recorded homepage for the RAL Particle Physics Department, included in the 1993 RAL Annual Report. Image: STFC
The Web goes worldwide
Tim Adye, one of my colleagues, peered at the screen of this computer when Berners-Lee first showed him the new project he was working on. Adye had come to his office to talk to him about other software work they were collaborating on at the time. As a recent British arrival, Berners-Lee had done his best to help him feel welcome at the laboratory, including inviting him to dinner at his home. Although Adye could see that the Web would be a useful tool for particle physicists, who “were already used to the idea that although the data is produced in one place, you want to access it from another place.” However, he remembers thinking that the title “World Wide Web” was “a little grandiose”, although fortunately, he didn’t mention that to Berners-Lee.
Adye wasn’t alone. Berners-Lee’s DAQ colleague told me “No one had any concept of what it was going [to be]. I think people probably thought it would permeate academia”, spreading slightly beyond particle physics, but not much further. “Of course, the rest is history”.
By the end of 1990, Berners-Lee’s web server and browser was up and running. In 1991, Nicola Pellow, a Leicester Polytechnic student on placement at CERN, wrote a programme for a simple browser that allowed the Web to be used on any computer. It then began to spread more quickly amongst the global particle physics community, including to my own department. I first decided to write this article when my supervisor, a CERN physicist, told me, “Someone was talking to me about RAL having the first UK website and I'm now trying to figure out if that's true”. This turned out to be a difficult question to answer.
Although Berners-Lee played a key role in drumming up new users for the Web, it was – by design – decentralised, making it harder to keep track of the UK Web timeline. Also, as another PPD colleague, Dave Kelsey, pointed out to me, there were lots of new technologies springing up all the time for people to try out. As almost no one yet realised the key role the Web would play in world history, its history was scantily recorded. Kelsey, however, dug out his notes from the 1992 Computing Group Annual Meeting. One person present noted the Web as the development he was most excited about in 1992.
The first recorded homepage for the RAL Particle Physics Department, included in the 1993 RAL Annual Report. Image: STFC
The first evidence we have of a more formal RAL site is in June 1993. However, many other UK sites were already operating by this point, including some from the University of Leeds. Brian Kelly, the Information Officer for their Computing Service, first came across the Web at a workshop on Internet tools on 9th December, 1992.
The University of Leeds Computing Service installed a server on a central system in January 1993, which was probably the first WWW service provided centrally in the UK academic community. Later that month, Kelly recalled, a man called Robert Cailliau knocked on the door of his office. “[Cailliau] said, ‘Have you heard of the web?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah, it's great, would you like a demo?” Somewhat awkwardly for Kelly, Cailliau had actually helped Berners-Lee build the web, and was crucial to its adoption and rapid spread in the USA.
Robert Caillau, Nicola Pellow and Tim Berners-Lee with the first web browser at CERN. Image: CERN
Despite his early involvement, Kelly acknowledged that departmental websites, including those at Leeds, existed before this official site was set up. Another early UK site was the UK High Energy Physics data website at the University of Durham (http://cpt1.dur.ac.uk:80/HEPDATA), set up by Database Manager Mike Whalley by 16th June 1993. There are no doubt other possible contenders for the title of "1st UK Website", and we would love to hear from people with suggestions.
How do you weave a web?
As frustrating as I find this patchy early history, I think it speaks to the cultural influence of the global CERN community on the early Web. Particle physics has always been facilitated by large collaborations, where noting the contributions of individual physicists becomes more difficult, and therefore less important. The Web was built around the importance of sharing ideas, making data freely accessible, reducing social hierarchy. When its invention is touted as a CERN achievement, some argue it could have happened elsewhere – they may be right. I think, however, it would have looked quite different.
You need only look at the fall of Gopher, at one point a possible alternative to the Web, to understand CERN’s influence on its success. Use of Gopher, born out of the University of Minnesota, grew until 1993, when licencing fees were introduced. Clients dropped it almost immediately. In response, CERN released the World Wide Web software under an open-source model in 1994 – consistent with its current policy of keeping as much of its software, hardware and data as open-source as possible. It is easy to argue that if the Web was not freely available, it would not have had the impact it did.
Alongside the Web’s cultural influence, it has made almost incalculable contributions to the global economy. It also enormously benefited particle physics, with Dave Kelsey saying “It's certainly true that [with] the current scale of the experiments on the LHC, we could not do it without the internet.” Today, over 17,000 researchers from over 600 institutes and universities around the world use and contribute to CERN’s facilities, all connected by the Web.
As well as affirming my belief in the importance of publicly-funded research, learning about the early Web has helped me to reflect on my own response to current, potentially world-changing technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Whether people embraced the web with open arms, or dismissed it outright, its influence spread regardless. Who knows whether it’s better to be a harsh sceptic or the earliest adopter? I’m a bit of a fence sitter, so I normally end up somewhere in the middle. I’m trying, however, to listen to Dave Kelsey’s advice: “Be open to change and keep your eyes open, because you never quite know when the next thing's going to come.”
Emma Hattersley, October 2024
