The Web Goes World Wide

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios

Society & Culture, History

4.5 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

August 6, 1991. On an Internet news board, a memo appears, describing a new project that some scientists have been developing: “The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project.” It’s meant to help ordinary people use the Internet—which at the time is only being used by a small group of experts. How did a group of scientists and coders even conceive of something like the Web? And how did they bring it not just to coders and other specialists, but to the rest of us—for better or for worse?

Special thanks to our guests: Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff, Peggie Rimmer, Ben Segal, and Marc Weber, Web historian and curator at the Computer History Museum. To learn more about the Web’s story, visit the Internet History Program page on the Museum’s website: computerhistory.org/nethistory.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, Original Podcast.
0:04.8	History this week, August 6, 1991.
0:13.2	I'm Sally Helm.
0:17.7	This story is about an innovation, a huge one.
0:21.6	But it starts with the most mundane historical artifact imaginable, a digital memo.
0:29.9	It looks sort of like a spam email you might get from a listserv, you forgot you subscribed to.
0:34.8	For a new search Julia Press, hi Sally.
0:37.4	Hello Julia. So yes, this memo. It's not an email more like a post on a forum.
0:43.7	It goes out to a few hundred computer programmers and tech fans under the subject line,
0:48.8	read qualifiers on hypertext links dot dot dot.
0:54.0	If you saw that in the list of posts, you could be forgiven for skipping over it.
0:58.0	You certainly could.
0:59.0	But if you did, you would be missing something that will change the entire world.
1:04.6	The memo is from an engineer named Tim Berners-Lee.
1:08.2	Tim Berners-Lee, remember that name?
1:10.1	He's writing to a community of fellow coders and engineers about a little project he's been working on.
1:15.2	He calls it the World Wide Web, WWW Project.
1:20.8	And he includes an address where you can find out more in address for the world's first website.
1:27.0	Listeners, you may know that Tim's little WWW project takes off.
1:32.6	This memo is the web's big bang.
1:35.6	It arguably kicks off the creation of the entire online universe that we know today.
1:40.7	To be clear, the internet does exist in 1991.
	...

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