«So 30 years ago CERN made the World Wide Web accessible to all»- Corriere.it

«In 1993 – says Fabiola Gianotti in the Invisible Geniuses podcast – CERN made the World Wide Web accessible to everyone. It means that anyone on the planet could access the web, could develop it, could use it. And this was done because the founding convention of CERN, in 1954, established that everything that the laboratory develops produces in terms of scientific results rather than technological developments must be made available to humanity free of charge».

For years it has been the vexed question of the Net: who gave, so to speak, the World Wide Web to the world? Tim Berners-Lee? Or Cern? Here is the original document that tells the other half of the story of the web.

Berners-Lee is rightly considered a great social figure: like all major events related to humanity, the Net too has founding myths. The reason is related to the perception of the “gift” of the hypertext that could have been marketed or made money. But did it really happen like this? In the Cern document that was provided to me by a scientist from the same physics center in Geneva, Maurizio Bona, we find the first clues of this piece of real prehistory of the Web.

Without detracting from Berners-Lee’s good intentions, his invention, despite being “his”, belonged from the point of view of intellectual property to Cern itself for which the engineer worked as an official. As often happens in academic contexts or research centres, what is born within remains with the institution (it is assumed that the result also depends, for example, on the “genetic” know-how of the context in which one operates or even on the equipment that you have access to. at that time The reason was similar: to avoid being subjected to lawsuits later.

This also explains why the first website in history was precisely that of Cern built in 1989 and put online in 1991. I recommend clicking here on info.cern.ch to take a leap in time and see what the Net was in its entirety. prehistory. It’s like getting on a local train after being used to moving with the Japanese Shinkansen (we have trains that are just as fast but not as punctual). We try again the intoxication of slowness, the pleasure of passing time. But try to live like this again every day.

In the podcast Ilaria Capua tells another piece of this story that we now call Open Science: in the midst of the avian flu emergency in 2006, the routine procedure provided for the sharing of virus sequencing only in private databases accessible to a few research centers in the world. The great transparency revolution was born in a small Venetian town specialized in the passage of viruses from the animal world to the human world, the Experimental Zooprophylactic Institute of the Venezie then directed by Ilaria Capua. It is worth mentioning that it was she who put the avian flu virus that she and her team had isolated into an open database. For that choice the scientist was called by the then head of the United Nations Kofi Annan and she had to justify herself, defend herself. In 2000 that gesture helped us defeat Sars-Cov-2.