6.1 Birth of the World Wide Web
Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known by its acronym CERN, is a European research organization operating the world’s largest particle physics laboratory as well as the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest high-energy particle collider [184]. CERN, which is located in Geneva, Switzerland, also hosts a large computing facility for storing and analyzing data collected in experiments.
Figure 6.1: Project proposed at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee that led to the creation of the WWW
In 1989, while working as an independent contractor at CERN, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW [44]. Berners-Lee wrote a project proposal describing how information about accelerators and experiments at CERN can be managed using a distributed hypertext system [20].
The report described what CERN needed from such a system and how it could...
