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20 Years of the World Wide Web in the Public Domain

On 30 April 1993, the organization behind the creation of the Web, CERN, officially put the World Wide Web project software — line-mode client, basic server, and common code library — into the public domain. And history was thus written by Tim Berners-Lee, with significant help by Robert Cailliau. You can now read more of that history, and see both the first Web site and the original legal documents, at the site that CERN has put up to celebrate this momentous anniversary. (Adam here. Little did I know, when I met Cailliau at the Hypertext ’93 conference in Seattle, exactly with whom I was having lunch and helping with directions to where he could shop for his teenage daughter. I was somewhat embarrassed, since I hadn’t said complimentary things about his MacWWW browser in my “Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh” book, given that the software was primitive and very buggy, but he was nonetheless very kind.)

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