Tim Berners-Lee formalized his proposal for the World Wide Web
On this day · 12 November 1990
On November 12, 1990, a CERN memo titled "WorldWideWeb" turned a hypertext daydream into a fundable engineering plan.
On November 12, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Belgian engineer Robert Cailliau circulated a CERN management document titled “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project.” It reworked Berners-Lee’s vaguer March 1989 memo into something a budget committee could approve, complete with timelines and the now-familiar vocabulary of “browsers” linking “hypertext” documents into a single “web.”
The pitch was modest. The pair asked for a few staff and roughly CHF 80,000 of equipment, promising simple browsers first and editing features later.
“HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will.”
Within weeks Berners-Lee had written the first browser and server on a NeXT machine, and by 1991 the Web was running beyond CERN. The document reads less like a manifesto than a maintenance ticket, which is exactly why it worked: it made an unprecedented idea sound like ordinary, approvable work.
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