It is the program that created the web and paved the way for the Internet as we know it today. Thirty years after its conception, its author, Briton Tim Berners-Lee, sells the original code from the World Wide Web as a collector’s item, along with an NFT (non-fungible token), digital certificate of authenticity. Even more than Guntenberg and the printing press, Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb or James Watson’s DNA, the World Wide Web “has changed every aspect of your life”, argues Cassandra Hatton, vice-president of Sotheby’s, who organized the sale.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist turned computer scientist, envisioned an information sharing system that would allow scientists to access data anywhere in the world.
WWW created in 1990
While employed at the CERN Computing Center (originally the European Council for Nuclear Research now the European Organization for Nuclear Research), near Geneva, he called this new network World Wide Web (WWW). In 1990 and 1991 he wrote the program that created the first Internet browser, laying the practical foundations for today’s Web.
In passing, he invented the concepts of URL (Internet address), HTTP (which allows you to find a site) and HTML (the standard computer language for creating Internet pages). Decided to make this canvas an open space, Tim Berners-Lee did not patent his program and made it freely available to all, which contributed to its dissemination.
Already $ 2.8 million
A little more than three decades after its invention, it will receive part of the incalculable wealth generated, with the sale of its original files, of which he however intends to donate all of the proceeds to charities. Sotheby’s did not provide an estimate for this lot, which includes an animated version of these nearly 10,000 lines of code and a letter from the author. On Friday, five days before the end of the online sale that started on June 23, the price was already at $ 2.8 million.
“Ten years ago, we couldn’t have” made this sale, said Cassandra Hatton. The arrival of NFT technology, making it possible to create a tamper-proof digital property certificate, has changed the game in the eyes of collectors, who are now reassured about the traceability of their acquisitions.