MIT 150: The Top 50

Number One: World Wide Web Consortium The first sentence on the first World Wide Web site had to explain to visitors what exactly this thing was. It described the Web as a “wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” Oh. Nobody could have imagined that would one day include classified war documents, videos of talking dogs, and the ability to stream movies and instant message with friends. Tim Berners-Lee , the soft-spoken Briton who invented the Web in 1989 while working at a particle physics lab in Geneva, came to MIT in 1994 to help create the World Wide Web Consortium, to help spread technical standards for building websites, browsers, and devices (like televisions) that offer access to Web content. His greatest act of all was actually something he didn’t do: patent his invention or extract licensing fees from those who used his ideas – decisions that helped the Web go global in a few years. “The thing spread largely because I didn’t make World Wide Web Incorporated in 1991,” Berners-Lee has said. When Queen Elizabeth II knighted Berners-Lee, he said it showed that great things could happen to ordinary people who took on projects that “happen to work out.”
Wendy Maeda/ Globe Staff

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Number One: World Wide Web Consortium

The first sentence on the first World Wide Web site had to explain to visitors what exactly this thing was. It described the Web as a “wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” Oh. Nobody could have imagined that would one day include classified war documents, videos of talking dogs, and the ability to stream movies and instant message with friends. Tim Berners-Lee, the soft-spoken Briton who invented the Web in 1989 while working at a particle physics lab in Geneva, came to MIT in 1994 to help create the World Wide Web Consortium, to help spread technical standards for building websites, browsers, and devices (like televisions) that offer access to Web content. His greatest act of all was actually something he didn’t do: patent his invention or extract licensing fees from those who used his ideas – decisions that helped the Web go global in a few years. “The thing spread largely because I didn’t make World Wide Web Incorporated in 1991,” Berners-Lee has said. When Queen Elizabeth II knighted Berners-Lee, he said it showed that great things could happen to ordinary people who took on projects that “happen to work out.”