“Information Management: A Proposal” is the document Tim Berners-Lee wrote at CERN in March 1989 that gave birth to the World Wide Web. It is a short, practical paper aimed at CERN management, not a grand manifesto. It opens by describing a real problem at the laboratory: information was constantly lost as people and projects changed, and there was no good way to keep track of how everything connected.
Berners-Lee’s solution was a distributed hypertext system. He argued that CERN should “work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.” The W3C keeps a copy of the original text, including diagrams showing how documents, people, and machines could all be linked together.
The document is famous for a handwritten note. When Berners-Lee gave the proposal to his manager, Mike Sendall, Sendall wrote “Vague but exciting…” across the top. CERN’s own timeline records that comment, which was enough to let Berners-Lee keep working on the idea. He could not yet describe exactly what it would become, but the potential was clear.
That “vague but exciting” proposal is now regarded as one of the founding documents of the modern internet. From it came the first web browser, the first web server, and the standards HTTP, HTML, and URLs that the Web still runs on.