Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

NPR says that on April 30, 1993, something called the World Wide Web launched into the public domain, the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher in Switzerland at CERN, now known for its particle accelerators.

I was a freshman in high school in 1993, but I don’t recall using the internet much in school. By the time I was a junior, we had an internet-computer lab, but I think most of my searches were for “boobs.” Once you found the boobs, you’d hit print and pray no one came into the lab while the printer struggled like an emphysema patient, wheezing out one pained line of heavily pixelated boob at a time, only to stop printing entirely as it was overloaded with too much boob data.

Chat rooms were a big thing early on too, and my recollection is that I primarily used those to get into arguments with people halfway around the world, usually about something neither of us really knew anything about. It seems to me that, 30 years later, the internet hasn’t changed much, but has only taken on new forms. On the bright side, printers are now much faster. 

NPR called back some of its reporting from the time, describing the internet then as “…more chaos than you can imagine [with] literally thousands and thousands of websites… By the end of 1995, more than 24 million people in the U.S. and Canada alone spent an average of 5 hours per week on the internet.”

Fast forward 30 years and 6 billion people regularly use the internet to visit hundreds of millions of websites, and while many of these websites include boobs, somewhat surprisingly, not all of them do.

What was most interesting to me about today’s NPR story was that Berners-Lee eventually convinced CERN to release the World Wide Web without any patents or fees. CERN owned his invention, and the lab had the option to license it for profit. 

When asked by a reporter years later about why he didn’t cash in, Berners-Lee replied, “The question, when it’s posed like that, implies that you really only measure people’s value by their net worth.” People are what they’ve done, what they say, what they stand for, rather than what they happen to have in the bank.”