On March 12, 1989, a quiet British engineer named Tim Berners-Lee dropped a thin paper document on his boss's desk at CERN, the giant physics lab outside Geneva, Switzerland. It was a 19-page proposal for linking documents across CERN's computers so scientists could find each other's work without endless phone calls. His boss, Mike Sendall, scribbled four words at the top: 'Vague but exciting.' That was the green light.
Berners-Lee had quietly built the whole idea in his head while working as a contractor at CERN years earlier. Over the next two years he wrote the first web browser, the first web server, and the first web page - all on a beige NeXT computer he kept under his desk. By 1991 the World Wide Web was alive. By the mid-1990s it was changing the world.
Today billions of people open a web browser every day. Each click is built on the same simple ideas Tim handed to his boss that morning - and CERN gave the whole invention away to the world for free. The original proposal still exists, with the four-word note that almost lost it in a filing cabinet forever.
