The World Wide Web was invented by accident

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Tim Berners-Lee is the computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. Yes, he literally invented it.  The web is different from the Internet. Think of the Internet as a system of highways and roads that connects things together. In real life, we really don’t see the Internet; it’s in the background. The web is all the cool stuff we do see that is built on top of the Internet. Every website, blog, or video stream runs through the web.

He also had a strong vision for an open web, where the free and open exchange of information would be protected and kept away from corporate or government interests that could limit the access or the information itself.

As an academic scientist, Berners-Lee wanted to improve humanity. By giving away the web, he has made information-sharing easier for billions of people. A great idea, and one that was desperately needed as society was quickly moving into the information age in the 1980s.

Berners-Lee was first driven by the desire to improve a filing system used by fellow researchers. When he realized what www.anything.com could become, he was driven to do something to change the world.

The story continues with a group of engineering students at the University of Illinois that invented the first web browser. Mosaic gave the non-technical user the ability to click-through on an underlined word or phrase and gain access to more and more information. I was lucky to have a sophisticated and really smart colleague at the time, Michael Wilens, who gave me a demo of Mosaic before it was generally available. It took about a half second to see the enormous potential of one-click access to anything. (A month after showing me Mosaic, Wilens introduced me to another new technology, it was this thing called “email.”)

One of the students who built Mosaic was Marc Andressen, who graduated, connected with veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Clark, and Netscape, the first commercially available browser was born. Andressen went on to become one of the biggest (and most outspoken) venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

Key Insights

• Never underestimate the value of building anything new. Berners-Lee thought he was creating a mundane filing system.

• Once you have something created, think hard about what to do with it. Should you use legal protections (eg, patents) or should you make it a Freemium product (think Dropbox) and capitalize on the follow-up product or service.

• Innovation happens much faster today then when Berners-Lee created the web. (Its faster because of the web.) Assume your great idea is already being worked on somewhere else and figure out how to build the moat around your product by establishing unique customer relationships, exclusive partnerships, and other actions that make your product stand above the competition.

How did we do?

This Month’s Reading Recommendations

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
From the author of The Black Swan. You will learn to think differently after reading this.

Weaving the Web
The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web (by Berners-Lee)

Zero to One
Billionaire Peter Thiel on why the bulk of the value is created early in any venture

Things I think about

Americans spend 1/3 less time reading today than they did 20 years ago. Did somebody say “YouTube?”

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