The World Wide Web at Twenty: The Birth of the World Wide Web

August 2, 2011

“Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked. . . .Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which anything could be linked to anything. All the bits of information in every computer at CERN [Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire – the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland] and on the planet would be available to me and to anyone else. There would be a single, global information space.”[1]

This vision, which would be the basis for what he later would name “The World Wide Web,” was that of Tim Berners-Lee – a young, British, Oxford-educated physicist. It came to him in 1980. Just fourteen years later, by 1994, an approximation of his initial vision – though not all information stored on computers everywhere – was becoming a reality.

Christian Chadd Taylor and the Search for the World Wide Web

August 31, 2012

One warm summer afternoon in 2000, Christian Chadd Taylor, a young lawyer in his sixth year as an attorney at a prominent law firms, Kirkland & Ellis, found himself driving a rental car up a long, narrow and steep road in the Alpine foothills outside Geneva, Switzerland. Taylor, a lean, broad shouldered, wiry individual who enjoyed rock-climbing, had humble beginnings—a workingman’s family in the tiny community of Shoals in southern Indiana, population 807. A decade earlier he had earned a degree in electrical engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, where he had been president of the student government.