🌐 A proposal that changed everything

Hey folks! Today, we’re launching something big: Paper Trail, a new project in which I’ll look at seminal research papers that have shaped the world. I’m cheating slightly with this inaugural issue, but hopefully you’ll forgive me: as the author of Hypertextual, I had to start with Tim Berners-Lee’s idea for, basically, the internet as we know it.

The problem

When Tim Berners-Lee, a 33-year-old software engineer, submitted his proposal to CERN management for what would become the World Wide Web, he opened with a complaint.

CERN had several thousand people, many of them staying for only about two years. Its working structure, Berners-Lee wrote in March 1989, was a multiply connected “web” whose links changed over time. That created a communication problem: “The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found.”

So what could be done?

Before proposing his answer, Berners-Lee took apart the alternatives. Hierarchical systems — file trees, help systems, documentation databases — gave every item a unique address, but could not express relationships between items in different branches.

In a hierarchical HELP system, for example, a user might reach a note, find an instruction to look elsewhere entirely, and then have to start again. “What was needed was a link from one node to another,” he wrote, “because in this case the information was not naturally organised into a tree.”

What about keywords? Not really an option. Two people rarely choose the same ones, so keywords “become useful only to people who already know the application well.”

In the end, Berners-Lee suggested something else: a web of nodes and links. A node could be a person, a document, a concept, a piece of hardware. A link could carry a relationship: “depends on”, “is part of”, “refers to”, “uses”. No fixed tree. No single required structure. “The system must allow any sort of information to be entered. Another person must be able to find the information, sometimes without knowing what he is looking for.”

Then came the radical part: non-centralisation. “Information systems start small and grow,” he wrote. “They also start isolated and then merge.” Any new system had to let existing systems link together “without requiring any central control or coordination.”

In a sign that this was a research proposal, not a corporate platform pitch, Berners-Lee listed security and copyright enforcement under “Non requirements”. At CERN, he wrote, information exchange was more important than secrecy. The proposal ended with a modest estimate: “I imagine that two people for 6 to 12 months would be sufficient for this phase of the project.”

Building the web

CERN did not immediately act on the proposal. It circulated internally and picked up comments, including the famous “vague, but exciting” from Berners-Lee’s manager, Mike Sendall. In May 1990, Berners-Lee submitted a second version. Robert Cailliau joined the effort, rewrote the proposal, and together they formalised it as a management submission in November 1990. By Christmas that year, Berners-Lee had built the first pieces: a browser-editor, a server, and the core standards — HTTP, HTML, and URLs — running on a NeXT Computer.

By March 1991, the software was available to CERN colleagues. In August, Berners-Lee announced it on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. At first, uptake was slow and mostly academic. The real shift came in 1993, when the Mosaic browser made the web usable beyond specialist circles, and CERN released the code into the public domain. That removed licensing barriers, allowing others to build on the system freely. The “web of nodes and links” could now scale into a global system.

Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was not imagining cat videos, memes, or AI-generated slop. He was trying to solve CERN’s information problem. The result became the infrastructure of everyday life.

The path not taken

Without Berners-Lee, we would still have gone online. But the web might have arrived as a set of rival systems: university databases, corporate portals, government networks, paid directories, each with its own rules and walls.

You do not need counterfactual fiction to glimpse that internet. We already live with pieces of it: app stores, closed social networks, private feeds, search results shaped by platforms, information that exists but cannot be freely linked, indexed, or found. Berners-Lee’s web did not prevent that future. But it left us the tools to resist it: the page, the link, the public address, the independent site. That is still the web worth defending.

What’s next?

Paper Trail will run alongside the regular “Things I learned” emails, with new issues roughly once a week. If you want to support the project, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. And if you have suggestions — on the format or on which papers to cover next — leave a comment below or reply to this email. I’ll see you next week!

Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.