At the 2009 TED conference last week, Tim Berners-Lee told the audience that they found the original document he had written outlining the World Wide Web at CERN in his boss's papers after he died. Written in the margin was "vague, but exciting."
I printed out a copy of "Information Management: A Proposal" from 1989 and Tim Berners-Lee was kind enough to autograph it (scanned image below). I also read it, and have to admit I probably would have had the same reaction as his boss. You could call this the "Executive Summary of the World Wide Web," the beginnings of URL's, HTTP, and HTML. But I'm not sure I would have seen past all the hypertext references (nothing new there, Ted Nelson and Apple's HyperCard were around for years), and the debate around text versus graphics/media. My favorite understatement of the proposal is "I imagine that two people for 6 to 12 months would be sufficient for this phase of the project."
But other parts were more obvious in their brilliance: a distributed system linking everything together, the ability to access data in all formats, a client "browser" that runs on any platform, and early insight into the power of connecting databases. It's easy to see in hindsight, but I'm not sure I would have seen it after a quick review of the proposal, and it definitely makes me want to review all the business plans we receive a little closer from now on.
Very cool. Chris, do you still have that note that Tom Peter's wrote to you. I remembered that great keynote he gave in San Francisco @ CL.
Posted by: Rafael Fabre | March 14, 2009 at 01:07 AM