Introduction to Cyber Security

Interview with Tim Berners-Lee

NARRATOR:
In 1980, a young software consultant called Tim Berners-Lee wrote a programme called ENQUIRE.
It involved the use of hypertext, links that allow users to jump directly from one computer page to
another. It's sowed the intellectual seeds of an information revolution-- the World Wide Web.
In the late 1990s, Tim gave several interviews against rather noisy backgrounds for the Open
University series thewebstory.com.
TIM BERNERS-LEE:
The web is an abstract space of information. The web is a space of pages, of documents, of
pictures, which are linked together. And the links are abstract links. Now in fact, for the web to
exist, all this information about the links and about the documents is transferred over the internet.
NARRATOR:
Tim's pioneering idea for the World Wide Web emerged in 1989, when he was working for CERN,
the European organisation for nuclear research.
TIM BERNERS-LEE:
I was just frustrated with a lack of interoperability, the fact that people were championing different
documentation systems and help systems. And I tried experimenting with actually taking all the
documents in one system and making it appear as though they were in this help system. So I
looked at the mapping between the two, and eventually I realised that this little hypertext
programme I'd been playing with 10 years before was, in a sense, the key, and that if you made a
global hypertext system, any of these systems could be represented in terms of it.
And so suddenly, this was the answer to making any system available without disturbing it, even.
That was the key thing. Without putting constraint on somebody, forcing them to use a particular
machine, forcing them to store their documents in a particular format.
It just said, all right, let's not force any of those issues. Let's just second-guess them. Let's step
above them, and let's say, whatever format you put your document in, let's say that it's part of the

universal space. And let's find a way of making an identifier for it. And once you had that idea, it's
really pretty unstoppable.
So when I said, hey, I think we should make a completely general global hypertext system, the
very proper answer at CERN was, well, that's fine, but it's not what we're here for. So in fact, it was
only because my boss, Mike Sandel, who had a sort of twinkle in his eye, and thought, hm, I don't
know what exactly this is about, but I have a feeling that it sounds kind of exciting.
And he said, well, why don't you spend the next couple of months-- you know, I won't complain if
you just go and write the programme. If Mike hadn't said that, if I'd had to go through the process
of trying to get a formal project approved, it would never have happened.
NARRATOR:
Tim's brilliant idea was to make documents located on one computer appear to be located in a
window on another computer. It took Tim and his colleague Robert Cailliau two years to develop
and refine the protocols that could make this happen.
TIM BERNERS-LEE:
When you're looking at a web page and you click on a hypertext link, then hidden behind the actual
text of what's written there is the identifier of some other page. When you click on it, then the
programme which shows you that page looks up the identifier. An identifier's one of these things
which starts with http://.
Now the http means if you want to get at this thing, this is how you do it. You take the rest of the
string, the rest of the characters, and the first bit is something like www.acme.com. And that is the
is name of a computer, in fact.
So the first thing you do is you go out to another computer you know which knows about
[INAUDIBLE] computers and says, hey, where do I find this? And you get back a computer
number, like 28.34.6.12. Something looking more like a telephone number of the other computer.
Then your computer uses that to start communicating with the other computer, which has got the
information.
And what it does, it sends a very simple message. It just says get, and then it gives the rest of all
the other characters left. So when you look at something which says http://-- that means "use
hypertext transfer protocol. www.something.com-- that means go to this computer. Slash,
gobbledy-gook-gobbledy-gook.

Gobbledy-gook-gobbledy-gook, you don't have to understand. All you do is you know that's what
you asked for. So it makes a connection and it sends a very simple command, which is get
gobbledy-gook-gobbledy-gook. And the response is that the information about how to put up that
page comes back across the internet, across that connection.
So it's really very simple. It's just, get me gobbledy-gook. Here's gobbledy-gook.
NARRATOR:
To start with, the web was limited to developments within the CERN community. Then in August
1991, Tim and his colleagues launched the first publicly available website, a milestone in the
history of the internet.
TIM BERNERS-LEE:
A lot of people ask, what was it like when the web-- when it suddenly exploded? When-- but it
didn't. It didn't suddenly explode. What happened was that it was, for the first two years, a big, hard
slog trying to persuade everybody that the idea of global hypertext was not too crazy, or too
complicated, or too confusing, or too expensive, or whatever. And in fact, that it was very simple,
and in fact, it would save time, et cetera.
So with my fellow evangelist and colleague, Robert Cailliau, we went around to conferences and we
went and talked to people individually within the high-energy physics community-- which was
basically paying our salaries, remember. So I had to persuade them this was important for highenergy physics. And we, at the same time, sent our some emails and some articles to newsgroups
and things.
And it was not apparent that it was going to actually make it for a long time. But the interesting
thing was that when I looked at the logs of the servers-- the first server was called info.cern.ch.
And the load on that server, which started off serving 10, 100 hits a day in the summer of '90-- the
load on that server went up exponentially during the next 12 months.
And then when I looked back the year after that and made a graph of the second 12 months, it was
again exactly the same-shaped exponential curve. So after a while, I started plotting it on a log
scale so that you could see it as it went up from the hundreds to the thousands to the tens of
thousands. And the load on that server was just-- as the time went on from the summer of '91,
summer of '92, summer of '93, summer of '94-- the load on the server just went on increasing by a
factor of 10 every year.
NARRATOR:

But the growing success of the World Wide Web only partially realised Tim's initial dream of what
might be possible.
TIM BERNERS-LEE:
The first part of it was, wouldn't it be great if we had this universal information space, and
everybody could be in equilibrium with it so they could exchange information very fluidly through it?
Wouldn't this do something amazing for humankind, if we were connected through this information
space? That was the dream, part one.
And the other half of the dream was, suppose you have a situation where any idea which is worth
typing in, worth clicking in with a mouse, is in the web? Then maybe we should bring back the
computers, the computers which have gotten out the way. The computers which have hidden,
made themselves scarce, and just produced this information for us. Maybe we'll be able to use
them again. Maybe we'll be able to write programmes which can analyse what on Earth our society
is like, what on Earth we are trained to do.
That was the second part of the dream. And that's not there at all. So that, we need a whole lot
more technology in the web. We need machine-understandable information. We need digital
signature. We need a web of trust. We need logical reasoning out there on the web. That is going
to be yet another revolution.
I think it's going to be as dramatic as the web phase I, if you like. And we haven't started yet. So
really, if you think everything's over, you're completely wrong. This is just the start. We're just
figuring out how to make these global revolutions using technology, and how to make them be a
good thing for humankind. So jump on board now, because it's just speeding up.
ANNOUNCER:
From the Open University. For more information, go to www.open.ac.uk/use.