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Enlarge / Tim Berners-Lee’s early presentation of the World Wide Web at CERN.
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Next week, Sir Tim Berners-Lee will auction the NFT of the original source code he used to create the World Wide Web.
The main part of the numerical collection would be 9,555 lines of time-stamped source code split between files created by Berners-Lee between October 3, 1990 and August 24, 1991. This code, written mostly in Objective-C, served as the early code as the basis for much of the modern Internet. , including this particular site. The files cover HTML, HTTP, and URI implementations along with the original HTML documents that Berners-Lee wrote as a sort of “read me” for the early web.
The NFT will also include a letter recently written by Berners-Lee containing his reflections on the original web code. The message is written in Markdown, making it ready on Github. The NFT will also come with a 30-minute black and white animated visualization of the code being typed. Finally, the lucky winner will receive an SVG “sticker” of Berners-Lee code, which the guy himself made using Python script. The poster also includes his vector signature at the bottom right.
Tim Berners-Lee wrote a letter containing ideas about the World Wide Web and the process through which it was invented. It is included in NFT as a README.md file.
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Berners-Lee thinks of creating the World Wide Web.
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Berners-Lee also created the “signed” SVG icon label.
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
NFTs, short for Non-fungible Tokens, are essentially digital certificates of reliability. They originated as a way for collectors to assert ownership of an “original” digital asset that is indistinguishable from any other digital copy, apart from the token. Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web NFT is encoded as a contract on the Ethereum blockchain.
Even today, you can still download some of the original code for free through various sites, including W3C and CERN. The files in the NFT are “similar” to those in the CERN link, “however, the CERN code is a slightly later version,” Sotheby spokeswoman Melika Khansari said. “The NFT is a unique package developed by Sir Tim.”
Selling an NFT from the original code, Berners-Lee appears to be eating his cake and eating it too, only about 30 years later. When CERN released Berners-Lee’s WorldWideWeb code in 1993—the name had no spaces at the time—it was not associated with patents or proprietary applications. So next week’s NFT is Berners-Lee’s chance to cash in on the original code, although that NFT appears to be charitable. “The sale will benefit the initiatives supported by Sir Tim and Lady Berners-Lee,” Sotheby’s said in a statement. Bidding will start at $1,000.
A clip of the visualization contained in the World Wide Web NFT.
A clip of the visualization contained in the NFT World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989 when he proposed a “distributed hypertext system” inspired by the challenge of managing the data flow that the Large Hadron Collider was emphatically producing. In the proposal, Berners-Lee wrote in the proposal: “Many discussions about the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question ‘Yes, but how are we going to track such a large project? “
In response to the suggestion, Berners-Lee boss gave him a shiny new NeXTcube so he could implement his ideas into code. The result was WorldWideWeb, a WYSIWYG tool that combines browsing and HTML composing. I saved the files to my local disk to be served by httpd. Today, you can explore Berners-Lee’s original ideas on the CERN website, where the world’s first website was published, along with a virtual version of the first browser running under your more modern counterpart.
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