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In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN, proposed a way to link the lab's scattered documents so that anyone could jump from one to another. His boss, Mike Sendall, wrote 'Vague but exciting...' on the cover and let him carry on. The idea became the World Wide Web.

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The proposal, 'Information Management: A Proposal', described a real problem. Most scientists stayed at CERN for about two years and then left, so knowledge was constantly being lost, and even written records were hard to find among the lab's many incompatible computers. His answer was hypertext: documents containing links that lead straight to other documents, spread across a network. He had tried a small version of the idea for himself in 1980, a program called ENQUIRE. The proposal drew little interest at first. He sent it round again in May 1990 and, with the Belgian engineer Robert Cailliau, turned it into a formal project plan that November. Sendall let him build the system on a newly bought NeXT computer, and after considering names such as 'Information Mesh', Berners-Lee settled on World Wide Web.

Türkçe oku
CERN'de çalışan İngiliz bilgisayar bilimci Tim Berners-Lee, Mart 1989'da laboratuvardaki dağınık belgeleri birbirine bağlayan bir sistem önerdi: Herkes bir belgeden ötekine geçebilecekti. Amiri Mike Sendall önerinin kapağına “Belirsiz ama heyecan verici...” yazdı ve işe koyulmasına izin verdi. World Wide Web bu fikirden doğdu.

“Information Management: A Proposal” (Bilgi Yönetimi: Bir Öneri) başlıklı metin gerçek bir sorunu anlatıyordu. CERN'e gelen bilim insanlarının çoğu iki yıl kadar kalıp ayrılıyor, bilgi de sürekli kayboluyordu. Yazıya geçirilmiş bir şey bile, laboratuvarın birbiriyle uyumsuz pek çok bilgisayarı arasında bulunamıyordu. Berners-Lee'nin çözümü hipermetindi: Belgeler bir ağa dağılmış olacak, ama içlerindeki bağlantılar okuru doğrudan başka belgelere götürecekti. Benzer bir fikri 1980'de kendisi için yazdığı ENQUIRE adlı küçük bir programla denemişti. Öneri başta pek ilgi görmedi. Berners-Lee metni Mayıs 1990'da yeniden dağıttı ve aynı yılın kasım ayında Belçikalı mühendis Robert Cailliau ile birlikte resmî bir proje planına dönüştürdü. Sendall, sistemi laboratuvara yeni alınan bir NeXT bilgisayarda kurmasına izin verdi. Berners-Lee, “Information Mesh” (Bilgi Ağı) gibi adları da düşündükten sonra World Wide Web'de karar kıldı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Tim Berners-Lee
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