CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. It is best known among physicists for its accelerators and detectors, but in the history of software it holds a unique place: it is where the World Wide Web was invented. CERN’s own account states that British researcher Tim Berners-Lee created the Web while working there in 1989, with the aim of letting scientists at universities and institutes around the world exchange information instantly.
The Web began as an internal tool. The first website ran on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer at CERN and described the Web project itself. That original site, at info.cern.ch, called the project “a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” CERN restored the site in 2013 so the public could see the early Web as it was.
CERN’s most consequential decision came on April 30, 1993, when the laboratory released the Web software into the public domain. By CERN’s own account it later issued the software under a free license as “a safer way to maximize its spread.” Because no one had to pay or ask permission to run a web server or write a browser, the Web grew explosively in the years that followed.
That openness is why CERN, a physics lab with no commercial interest in software, ended up giving the world its most widely used information system free of charge.