“Vague but exciting…”

Those are the now-classic handwritten words that appear on a document, dated March 1989, entitled “Information management: a proposal”. The document was composed by Tim Berners-Lee, who was then a little-known British physicist working as a computer scientist at the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva. As for the handwritten words themselves, they were penned by Berners-Lee’s boss Mike Sendall, who was also a physicist by training.

Although the document initially attracted little attention, Berners-Lee’s revolutionary idea was to provide a way to let the thousands of scientists at CERN keep track of all the information needed to build and operate the upcoming Large Hadron Collider. Envisaging the use of hypertext to link documents, Berners-Lee’s proposal was the birth of what became the World Wide Web.

The rest, as they say, is history.

With its roots in physics, the Web has transformed all aspects of life over the past 30 years. From buying books and finding information to streaming music and watching videos, it’s hard to imagine life without the Web, smartphones and super-fast Internet connections. And without the Web, there’d be no social media either – which, depending on your point of view, is either a blessing or a curse.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Web, we’ve got plenty of treats for you, including the special March 2019 issue of Physics World magazine. You can enjoy many of that issue’s articles – along with a host of others – in a special online-only collection. The collection includes a brilliant graphic by Jess Wade, a look at the business impact of the Web, and a podcast in which Hamish Johnston and I chew the fat over how on earth we got anything done before the Web came along.

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Electronic publishing and visions of hypertext

And finally, we’ve dug up this fantastic article from the Physics World vaults by Berners-Lee himself. Published as a feature in the June 1992 issue of the magazine, the article spells out his predictions for how the Web will transform academic publishing and the wider world. Some of Berners-Lee’s views proved off the mark – he did not predict the invention of search engines – but he proved astoundingly right on one thing, which was to envision an online platform that pretty much resembles what we know and love today as that invaluable information resource: Wikipedia. You can read Berners-Lee’s article “Electronic publishing and visions of hypertext” here.

• For more on CERN’s own celebrations, check out their 30th-anniversary programme or download a PDF of their special issue of CERN Courier magazine.