25 years of the World Wide Web: Internet inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, explains how it all began

Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web

Whatever date you choose for the actual birthday of the world wide web, it's an invention which has changed humanity forever, and created a new virtual world within a generation.There was no birthday cake, but you could have been forgiven for thinking a celebrity had just shown up at the Science Museum. Instead, photographers and film crews were clustered around a black, decidedly old-fashioned computer and keyboard. In an attempt to make the spectacle a little more exciting, museum bosses had dressed up a worker in obligatory science garb – white coat and white gloves.
Baroness Maratha Lane Fox was in attendance. The peer, who recently completed a stint as the government’s digital champion, took the limelight as the media gave up attempts to make the computer look interesting. Crowds of school-children passed by with barely a glance - understandable given the uninspiring sight of an old computer.
But they couldn’t have been more wrong. For the NeXT cube is the machine on which the World Wide Web was created by British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The only hint of its importance a tattered white sticker with the warning: “This machine is a server: DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” It may be hard to believe now, but the worldwide web did not exist 25 years ago - until Sir Tim invented a way of using networks of computers to talk to each other.
Yet there was no initial grand ambition to emancipate the world through freedom of information for all. The beginnings were much more mundane: an attempt to improve communication between the thousands of scientists involved with Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland.
Sir Tim was a 34-year-old physics graduate working as a software engineer at Cern in 1989, when he wrote a paper simply titled "Information Management: A Proposal". It stated: “the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes". Ironically, the aim was envisaged as “a universal linked information system” where “generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities".
It was initially damned with faint praise, his boss Mike Sendall writing “vague but exciting” on the cover.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaks after receiving the first ever Millennium Technology Prize in Helsinki in 2004 (Getty)