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How the Web awas Born: Stories from a scribe

Web veteran and CERN PR James Gillies tells us his perspective on the history of the Web. He shows the backstage vision from an insider's perspective of what used to be a "vague but exciting" idea that became the World Wide Web around the early 90s.

Here is the video of the presentations given last week at the celebration of the 20 years of the Web we co-organized with the CERN.

A passionate discussion about the past and the future of the web, with Tim Berners-Lee, Ben Segal (Tim's mentor and an open book on the history of our favorite invention), Robert Cailliau (who was the web's second user, at a time the whole network could be held on a floppy disk) and Jean-François Groff (who coded the first WWW libraries).

Later in the day, Chris Bizer (who launched the DBPedia project), Stephane Boyera (who heads the mobile efforts of the W3C), Dan Brickley (who was at the conference happening on the floor above Lift09 and didn't show up :D) and Tom Scott (who works at the BBC, trying to connect all the content created at the legendary English TV) take the stage to talk about the future, open data, semantic web, and much more.

© CERN

Lift and CERN are co-organizing a celebration of the 20 years of the WWW proposal today at 14h! There are two webcasts (CERN, lci.fr) and I will relay your questions to Tim Berners Lee so ask a question or vote for the ones you like!

For those who can not attend Friday's celebration with Tim Berners Lee, there will be a webcast of the event from 14:00 (CET) on the 13th March on webcast.cern.ch. Also, Eurovision will broadcast the event at 19:00 GMT (20:00 CET).

The organizers of the Celebration of the original proposal for the World Wide Web are offering 15 free tickets to attend this exceptional and invitation only event. Please visit this page to see the day's program and enter the sweepstakes.

Update: here comes more info, and 15 free tickets! We just ask you to leave your name and we will organize a lottery.

The other big announcement I made during Lift09's closing speech was that Tim Berners Lee will come back to Geneva to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web during a special event organized by the CERN and Lift.

Details of the program are coming soon (probably later today) and here is a recap of what I can already announce:
• The event will happen on March 13 at the Globe of Science and Innovation of the CERN
• Tim Berners-Lee will be here with Robert Cailliau, Ben Segal, and other members of the original adventure
• The event will focus on the story of the web's invention but also on the future
• Seating will be extremely limited (300 persons) and the event will be webcast
• Journalists can already contact press.office@cern.ch to request an accreditation
• A number of tickets will be available for Lifters.