Feature

They Asked CERN for a Few Engineers — and Described the World Wide Web

By , Tech Cheat Codes Team

Published 7 min read

Photo: The first web server at CERN, a black NeXT computer and monitor on a teal desk at CERN's Microcosm museum in 2005, with a keyboard labeled PROPRIETE CERN, a handwritten Do not power it down sticker, a copy of the March 1989 proposal memo titled Information Management: A Proposal, and an open book.
Image: Coolcaesar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0); resized and placed on a blurred background by Tech Cheat Codes
On this page · 2 sections
  1. A modest ask, and a huge promise
  2. References

Thirty-six years ago today. Two men pitched a web.

On Monday, Nov 12, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau sent a short cover note around CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics outside Geneva. Attached was a plan with a blunt title: "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project." The date at the top of the note was 12 November 1990. The names on the from line were T. Berners-Lee of the Computing and Networking division, and R. Cailliau of Electronics and Computing for Physics.

Today is Thursday, Nov 12, 2026. That proposal turns 36.

CERN already had a mountain of useful material, and almost no clean way to move from one pile to another. Reports, experiment data, personnel lists, email directories, and computer documentation all lived on discs, the two men wrote, "spinning around on computer discs continuously." The catch was painfully ordinary. Once you learned that someone named Joe Bloggs appeared in an incomplete software note, it was not straightforward to find his current email address. You usually had to switch machines, switch lookup methods, and start again. "Once you have located information, it is hard to keep a link to it," they wrote.

Their fix had a plain name. Hypertext, they explained, was a way to link and access information of various kinds "as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will." A program that let you travel that web would be called a browser. You would start on a page of your own, click a highlighted phrase, and the browser would bring you the text it pointed to. That next page would have links of its own. "The network of links is called a web," the proposal said. The web did not have to be a tree. You would not need to climb all the way back up before you could go down a related path.

A modest ask, and a huge promise

This was not Berners-Lee's first try at the idea. In March 1989, and again in a May 1990 recopy, he had written a longer CERN memo, "Information Management: A Proposal," about the way knowledge got lost when people left the lab after a couple of years. At that point he still called the system Mesh. He later wrote, on the copy kept by the World Wide Web Consortium, that he decided on the name World Wide Web "when writing the code in 1990."

The November plan made the ask concrete. The project would take two phases of about three months each, with four software engineers and a programmer, one of whom could be a fellow. Each person would need a then-current workstation, priced at 10,000 to 20,000 of the local currency, for a total of about 50,000, plus about 30,000 more for software licenses, visits, and advice. They wanted office space close enough that the team could talk through problems in person. In return they offered something unusually large for a lab software project: "to provide the software for the above free of charge to anyone."

They were just as clear about what they would not chase. Fancy multimedia research was out of scope. So were "sophisticated network authorisation systems." Data, they wrote, would be "either readable by the world (literally), or will be readable only on one file system." All network traffic would be public.

The first phase was supposed to put browsers on ordinary terminals and on machines people already had, including the Macintosh and the NeXT, and to hang the lab's existing notes and help files on the new web. The second phase would let readers add links and new material, so authorship would become "universal." One sentence in that section still sounds like a warning and a hope at the same time: making it easy to change the web was "the key to avoiding obsolete information."

They did not ask CERN to invent the modern internet. They asked for a handful of people, a few workstations, and permission to hang the lab's paperwork on a web of links, then give the software away. You are reading this on the thing they described.

Today's cheat code: if you cannot get on that web because the house Wi-Fi password has walked off, start here — Forgot Your Wi-Fi Password? How to Find It on Your Phone, Computer or Router.

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References

  • WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project — W3C, T. Berners-Lee / CN and R. Cailliau / ECP, dated 12 November 1990, accessed Nov 10, 2026, 3:35 PM ET (full text of the cover note and proposal opened; cover-note date 12 November 1990; from line T. Berners-Lee/CN, R. Cailliau/ECP; hypertext defined as a web of nodes the user can browse at will; browser; "The network of links is called a web"; web need not be hierarchical; Joe Bloggs / email-address example and "spinning around on computer discs continuously"; "Once you have located information, it is hard to keep a link to it"; phase one 3 months, phase two a further 3 months; manpower of 4 software engineers and a programmer, one of which could be a Fellow; workstations 10 to 20k each, totalling 50k, plus 30k for licences, visits and consultancy; "to provide the software for the above free of charge to anyone"; will not aim to do research into fancy multimedia or to use sophisticated network authorisation systems; "data will be either readable by the world (literally), or will be readable only on one file system"; "All network traffic will be public"; first-phase browsers for dumb terminals, vt220, Macintosh, NeXT; second phase "authorship becomes universal"; "Making it easy to change the web is thus the key to avoiding obsolete information")
  • Information Management: A Proposal — W3C, Tim Berners-Lee, CERN, March 1989, May 1990, accessed Nov 10, 2026, 3:48 PM ET (W3C's hand-converted copy of the earlier memo, opened in full; editorial note by Berners-Lee that the only name he had for it at the time was "Mesh," and that he decided on "World Wide Web" when writing the code in 1990; high turnover at CERN and lost information; linked notes as a "web"; Enquire in 1980)