The World Wide Web

1991 CE — Europe, Global

Today: CERN, on the French-Swiss border near Geneva

A British physicist at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, wanted an easier way for scientists to share documents, so he combined existing pieces — the internet, hypertext, addresses — into the World Wide Web, and in 1993 CERN put it into the public domain, free for anyone. Within a decade it had swallowed commerce, news, argument, and memory. It is the direct descendant of the clay tablet and the printing press: another sharp fall in the cost of copying and moving information, and another wholesale reordering of who holds knowledge and who speaks.

Worth knowing: Berners-Lee never patented the Web and made no money from inventing it. Had CERN chosen to license it instead of giving it away, the technology would likely have fragmented into rival incompatible networks — he has said the Web only worked because it was free of royalties and permissions.

Pattern: Information-medium revolution — A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Entry 234 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.