The European Organization for Nuclear Research, in French Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire, known as CERN; derived from the name Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.
Established in 1954, the organization is based in a northwest suburb of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border and has 23 member states. Israel is the only non-European country granted full membership. CERN is an official United Nations Observer.
The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which in 2019 had 2,660 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,400 users from institutions in more than 70 countries. In 2016 CERN generated 49 petabytes of data.
CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research -as a result, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations.
The main site at Meyrin hosts a large computing facility, which is primarily used to store and analyse data from experiments, as well as simulate events. Researchers need remote access to these facilities, so the lab has historically been a major wide area network hub. CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as https://example.com/), which may be interlinked by hyperlinks, and are accessible over the Internet.
The resources of the Web are
transferred via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), may be accessed
by users by a software application called a web browser, and are
published by a software application called a web server. The World Wide
Web is not synonymous with the Internet, which pre-dated the Web in some
form by over two decades and upon which technologies the Web is built.
More information: CERN
English scientist Timothy Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the public in August 1991. The Web began to enter everyday use in 1993-4, when websites for general use started to become available. The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age, and is the primary tool billions of people used to interact on the Internet.
Web resources may be any type of downloaded media, but web pages are hypertext documents formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Special HTML syntax displays embedded hyperlinks with URLs which permits users to navigate to other web resources. In addition to text, web pages may contain references to images, video, audio, and software components which are either displayed or internally executed in the user's web browser to render pages or streams of multimedia content.
Multiple web resources with a common theme and usually a common domain name, make up a website.
Website content can be provided by a publisher, or interactively from user-generated content.
Websites are provided for a myriad of informative, entertainment, commercial, and governmental reasons. The underlying concept of hypertext originated in previous projects from the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based memex, which was described in the 1945 essay As We May Think.
Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a global hyperlinked information system became a possibility by the second half of the 1980s.
By 1985, the global Internet began to proliferate in Europe and the Domain Name System (upon which the Uniform Resource Locator is built) came into being.
In 1988 the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was made and Berners-Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web-like system at CERN.
While working at CERN, Berners-Lee became frustrated with the inefficiencies and difficulties posed by finding information stored on different computers.
More information: Web Foundation
On 12 March 1989, he submitted a memorandum, titled Information Management: A Proposal, to the management at CERN for a system called Mesh that referenced to ENQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980, which used the term web and described a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded as text: Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document, you could skip to them with a click of the mouse.
Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the existing meanings of the word hypertext, a term that he says was coined in the 1950s. There is no reason, the proposal continues, why such hypertext links could not encompass multimedia documents including graphics, speech and video, so that Berners-Lee goes on to use the term hypermedia.
With help from his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiast Robert Cailliau he published a more formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a Hypertext project called WorldWideWeb (one word, abbreviated W3) as a web of hypertext documents to be viewed by browsers using a client-server architecture. At this point HTML and HTTP had already been in development for about two months and the first Web server was about a month from completing its first successful test.
More information: High Performance Browser Networking
This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve the creation of new links and new material by readers, so that authorship becomes universal as well as the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available. While the read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer to mature, with the wiki concept, WebDAV, blogs, Web 2.0 and RSS/Atom.
By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web the first web browser (WorldWideWeb, which was a web editor as well) and the first web server. The first website, which described the project itself, was published on 20 December 1990.
The Web began to enter general use in 1993-4, when websites for everyday use started to become available. Historians generally agree that a turning point for the Web began with the 1993 introduction of Mosaic, a graphical web browser developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (NCSA-UIUC).
More information: Web Design
before there was even one line of code written.
We could do that because the Internet
as an infrastructure was already there.
Robert Cailliau
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