Happy Birthday, www!

Mr Berners-Lee's creation can be changed for the better

On March 12, 1989, a 33-year-old scientist at the Physics Research Lab of Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN, which is a European Council for Nuclear Research) put forward a project proposal for “information management”, which his boss thought “vague but exciting”. Timothy Berners-Lee thought there was a new way to “share information about accelerators and experiments”. He named it “Mesh”. By the time he had written the code, he was calling it the “World Wide Web”. Mr Berners-Lee was one among a bunch of nerdy academics who used a communication system called the Internet. People using it sent