General Information about CERN (Central European Organisation of Nuclear Research)

CERN in a nutshell
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the worlds largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the worlds largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter - the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature. The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions. Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the FrancoSwiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europes first joint ventures and now has 20 Member States.

CERNs mission
Research, technology, collaboration, education The convention that established CERN in 1954 clearly laid down the main missions for the Organization. Primarily, the Convention states; The Organization shall provide for collaboration among European States in nuclear research of a pure scientific and fundamental character (...). The Organization shall have no concern with work for military requirements and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available. Today it is the contents of the nucleus the basic building blocks of the Universe that provide the key to unlock the frontier of fundamental research, but CERNs main mission remains essentially the same. The Convention also states that CERN shall organize and sponsor international cooperation in research, promoting contacts between scientists and interchange with other laboratories and institutes. This includes dissemination of information, and the provision of advanced training for research workers, which continue to be reflected in the current programmes for technology transfer and education and training at many levels. Research: Seeking and finding answers to questions about the Universe

Technology: Advancing the frontiers of technology Collaborating: Bringing nations together through science Education: Training the scientists of tomorrow

CERN's structure
The CERN Council is the highest authority of the Organization and has responsibility for all-important decisions. It controls CERNs activities in scientific, technical and administrative matters. The Council approves programmes of activity, adopts the budgets and reviews expenditure. The Council is assisted by the Scientific Policy Committee and the Finance Committee. The Director-General, appointed by the Council, manages the CERN Laboratory. He is assisted by a Directorate and runs the Laboratory through a structure of Departments.

Council
CERN is run by 20 European Member States, each of which has two official delegates to the CERN Council. One represents his or her governments administration; the other represents national scientific interests. Each Member State has a single vote and most decisions require a simple majority, although in practice the Council aims for a consensus as close as possible to unanimity.

Scientific Policy Committee

The Scientific Policy Committee evaluates the scientific merit of activities proposed by physicists and makes recommendations on CERNs scientific programme. Its members are scientists elected by their colleagues on the Committee and appointed by Council on the basis of scientific eminence without reference to nationality. Some members are also elected from non-Member States.

Finance Committee
The Finance Committee is composed of representatives from national administrations and deals with all issues relating to financial contributions by the Member States and to the Organizations budget and expenditure.

Director-General
Appointed by Council, usually for five years, the Director-General manages CERN. The Director-General is assisted by a Directorate, whose members he proposes to Council. The Director-General reports directly to the Council. He can also propose to Council any adjustment he deems necessary to meet the evolving needs of the research programme.

Directorate
Director-General: Rolf Heuer Director for Research and Computing: Sergio Bertolucci Director for Accelerators and Technology: Stephen Myers Director for Administration and General Infrastructure: Sigurd Lettow

International Relations

Co-ordinator for International Relations: Felicitas Pauss

Heads of Departments
PH - Physics: Philippe Bloch IT - Information Technology: Frederic Hemmer BE - Beams: Paul Collier TE - Technology: Frdrick Bordry EN - Engineering: Roberto Saban HR - Human Resources: Anne-Sylvie Catherin FP -Finance, Procurement and Knowledge Transfer : Thierry Lagrange GS - General Infrastructure Services: Thomas Pettersson

Directorate Office
Isabel Bejar-Alonso Ewa Rondio Emmanuel Tsesmelis

The name CERN

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The name is derived from the acronym for the French Conseil Europen pour la Recherche Nuclaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research, a provisional body founded in 1952 with the mandate of establishing a world-class fundamental physics research organization in Europe. At that time, pure physics research concentrated on understanding the inside of the atom, hence the word nuclear. When the Organization officially came into being in 1954, the Council was dissolved, and the new organization was given the title European Organization for Nuclear Research, although the name CERN was retained. Today, our understanding of matter goes much deeper than the nucleus, and CERNs main area of research is particle physics the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces acting between them. Because of this, the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.

A global endeavour
CERN is run by 20 European Member States, but many non-European countries are also involved in different ways. Scientists come from around the world to use CERNs facilities. The current Member States are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania, Israel and Serbia are candidates to become Member States of CERN.

Member States have special duties and privileges. They make a contribution to the capital and operating costs of CERNs programmes, and are represented in the Council, responsible for all important decisions about the Organization and its activities. Some states (or international organizations) for which membership is either not possible or not yet feasible are Observers. Observer status allows non-Member States to attend Council meetings and to receive Council documents, without taking part in the decisionmaking procedures of the Organization. Scientists from some 608 institutes and universities around the world use CERNs facilities. Physicists and their funding agencies from both Member and non-Member States are responsible for the financing, construction and operation of the experiments on which they collaborate. CERN spends much of its budget on building new machines (such as the Large Hadron Collider), and it only partially contributes to the cost of the experiments. Observer States and Organizations currently involved in CERN programmes are: the European Commission, India, Japan, the Russian Federation, Turkey, UNESCO and the USA. Non-Member States with co-operation agreements with CERN are: Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Georgia, Iceland, Iran, Jordan, Korea, Lithuania, Malta, Mexico, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, South Africa, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Vietnam. CERN also has scientific contacts with: China (Taipei), Cuba, Ghana, Ireland , Latvia, Lebanon, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mozambique, Palestinian Authority, Philippines, Qatar, Rwanda, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Venezuela. For further information about CERN's international relations please refer to: http://cern.ch/international-relations Half the worlds particle physicists CERN employs just under 2400 people. The Laboratorys scientific and technical staff designs and builds the particle accelerators and ensures their smooth operation. They also help prepare, run, analyse and interpret the data from complex scientific experiments. Some 10,000 visiting scientists, half of the worlds particle physicists, come to CERN for their research. They represent 608 universities and 113 nationalities.

History highlights

First excavation work on meyrin site From a simple green field to the largest particle physics laboratory in the world Some people may think this requires a leap of imagination. Actually, thats exactly the point. Many imaginative leaps and jumps weave their ways through the story of CERN to make it what it is today. But a stroll through this collection of highlights doesnt just tell the story of a laboratory, it also reflects the different challenges that grip particle physicists through the decades. As CERN continues to evolve through changing times, its goal of pure research continues to contribute to science and technology. From Nobel Prize winning physics to the World Wide Web. From 1954 to the here and now

Nobel prizes

J. Steinberger, F. Bloch, S. Ting, G. Charpak, C. Rubbia, S. van der meer One dream of CERNs founders, to achieve European eminence in big science, was realised in 1984, when Carlo Rubbia and Simon Van der Meer received the Nobel Prize in physics for their decisive contributions to the large project which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of the weak interaction. The project was a magnificently executed scheme to collide protons and antiprotons in the existing Super Proton Synchrotron. The experimental results confirmed the unification of weak and electromagnetic forces, the electroweak theory of the Standard Model. Less than a decade later, Georges Charpak, a CERN physicist since 1959, received the 1992 physics Nobel for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber, a breakthrough in the technique for exploring the innermost parts of matter. Charpaks multiwire proportional chamber, invented in 1968, and his subsequent developments launched the era of fully electronic particle detection. Charpaks detectors are also used for biological research and could eventually replace photographic recording in applied radio-biology. The increased recording speeds translate

into faster scanning and lower body doses in medical diagnostic tools based on radiation or particle beams. The Laboratory not only attracts Nobel Prizes but also Nobel Laureates. Indeed the first Director-General, Felix Bloch, was awarded the 1952 Nobel prize with Edward Mills Purcell, for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith. The 1976 physics Prize was awarded to the Large ElectronPositron Collider (LEP) experiment L3 spokesman Sam Ting, with Burt Richter, for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind. Discovered in 1974, the particle called J/ is a charm quark-antiquark composite. In 1988, Jack Steinberger, a CERN physicist since the late 1960s and head of the LEP ALEPH experiment at the time, was awarded the physics Prize with Leon Lederman and Mel Schwartz, for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino. The discovery, made in 1962 at the US Brookhaven National Laboratory, showed that there was more than one type of neutrino.

Why Fundamental Science?

From theory to experiment Some areas of scientific research, such as particle physics and cosmology, seem remote from everyday life and unlikely to bring immediate practical applications. Are they worth the effort in human and material resources? This research may take us far away from the conditions of everyday life, but because it continually pushes at boundaries in thinking and in technology it is a springboard for many new developments. Fundamental science is where new ideas and methods begin that later become commonplace - from the electric light, which originated in 19-century curiosity about electricity, to the World Wide Web, invented at CERN to allow international teams of particle physicists to communicate more easily. No amount of applied research on the candle would have brought us the electric light; no amount of R&D on the telephone would have brought about the Web. Science needs the space for curiosity and imagination.

Basic science in a competitive world

Large electron positron experiment by Robert Aymar, former Director General of CERN first published in Symmetry magazine, August 2006 We are constantly being told that we live in a competitive world in which innovation is the main driver towards growth and prosperity. What is the place in such a world for fundamental science, whose short-term contribution to society is knowledge without any immediate application? Is it an unnecessary luxury? Should the world be deploying its resources in pursuit of more pressing needs: public health, clean energy, safe water? Of course it should, and I believe that investment in fundamental science serves these goals. It is a long-term investment, laying the foundations for future innovation and prosperity. History teaches us that big jumps in human innovation come about mainly as a basic result of pure curiosity. Innovation is key to meeting many of todays development challenges, and the primary force for innovation is fundamental research. Without it, there would be no science to apply. Faraday's experiments on electricity, for example, were driven by curiosity but eventually brought us electric light. No amount of R&D on the candle could ever have done that. Electric light came from innovation driven by fundamental science. The long-term role of fundamental science is well understood by the European Investment Bank, the financial arm of the European Union. In 2003, the EIB gave a strong endorsement of fundamental science when it lent 300 million to CERN to help finance the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Why should the EIB consider the worlds largest fundamental physics project to be a worthy investment? I believe the reason is that fundamental science paves the way to future innovation. Fundamental research has the power to make people dream, and it attracts the innovators of the future into science. Without the excitement provided by research and discovery at the frontiers of knowledge, the pool of scientists would undoubtedly be smaller. The scientists who work on the LHC are driven by a desire to learn about the Universe, but that has not stopped them from developing particle acceleration and detection techniques that have found applications in medicine, for example. Scientists at CERN invented the World Wide Web, which has revolutionized the way we share information and do business. Today the LHC community worldwide is working on computing grids, the next frontier in information technology, which already have applications in fields such as Earth observation, climate prediction, petroleum exploration, and drug discovery.

LHC experiments will observe particle collisions at the rate of up to 600 million per second. This equates to about one petabyte per second, roughly the equivalent of about 150 000 DVD movies. Clearly, storing such quantities would be impossible, so we have to develop very clever electronics to sift out the interesting data. Even after draconian data reduction, however, we will be storing around 15 petabytes per year. Organizing access to this data for thousands of scientists from around the world is the reason particle physics is at the forefront of grid computing, which will make access to computing resources as simple as tapping into the electricity grid by plugging in an electric light. Fundamental science has a vital role to play in todays competitive world. It is fundamental science that lays the long-term foundations for innovation and prosperity. Abdus Salam, the Nobel prize-winning physicist from Pakistan, said, "In the final analysis, creation, mastery, and utilization of modern science and technology [are] basically what distinguishes the South from North. On science and technology depend the standards of living of a nation." This is the challenge for fundamental science in todays world of competition. Fundamental science has a vital role to play in the process of innovation. In todays competitive world, it is as important as it has ever been.

The use of basic science

The tracking chamber of the ALICE muon spectrometer by C.H. Llewellyn Smith, former Director-General of CERN Over 200 years ago, at the beginning of 1782, the German physicist and philosopher Christof Lichtenberg wrote in his diary: "To invent an infallible remedy against toothache, which would take it away in a moment, might be as valuable and more than to discover a new planet... but I do not know how to start the diary of this year with a more important topic than the news of the new planet". He was referring to the planet Uranus, discovered in 1781. The question Lichtenberg implicitly raised, of the relative importance of looking for technical solutions to specific problems, and of searching for new fundamental knowledge, is even more pertinent today than it was 200 years ago. In this paper I shall argue that the search for fundamental knowledge, motivated by curiosity, is as useful as the search for solutions to specific problems. The reasons we have practical computers now, and did not have them 100 years ago, is not that meanwhile we have discovered the need for computers. It is because of discoveries in fundamental

physics which underwrite modern electronics, developments in mathematical logic, and the need of nuclear physicists in the 1930s to develop ways of counting particles. I shall cite many examples that demonstrate the practical and economic importance of fundamental research. But if fundamental, curiosity-driven, research is economically important, why should it be supported from public, rather than private, funds? The reason is that there are kinds of science that yield benefits that are general, rather than specific to individual products, and hence generate economic returns which cannot be captured by any single company or entrepreneur. Most pure research is consequently funded by people or organizations who have no commercial interest in the results and the continuation of this kind of funding is essential for further advance. It would certainly be naive, even wrong, to equate the pure uniquely with the general, and the applied with the specific, but it is far more likely that a substantial proportion of the benefits of applied research will accrue to those who undertake it. Furthermore, once definite economic returns can clearly be anticipated, the private sector, motivated by profit, is generally better placed to undertake the necessary research and development. It follows that a policy of diverting public support from pure to applied scientific research would also divert funds from investment which only the public sector can make, to areas where the private sector is generally likely to do better. Section 2 of this paper contains some general remarks on the difference between basic and applied science. Section 3 then describes the benefits of basic science. In Section 4, the above well-known argument that governments have a special responsibility to support basic science as a "public good" is elaborated. This argument, which is relatively easy to make, leads to two much harder questions, which are dealt with in Sections 5 and 6 respectively: If companies can leave funding of basic science to governments, why can some governments not opt out leaving it to others as it is sometimes argued Japan has done very successfully? How should governments choose what to support, and at what level?

Physics for health

Positron emission tomography (PET) by Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN First published in the CERN Bulletin, Feb 2010 Ever since pioneers like Rolf Widere and Ernest Lawrence built the first particle accelerators in the 1920s and 30s, particle physics has contributed to advances in medicine.

Today, over half of the worlds particle accelerators are used in medicine, and more and varied uses are being found for them all the time. The same is true for particle detector technology. In the 1970s, CERN played an important role in the emerging technology of positron emission tomography (PET), building prototype scanners in a collaboration with Genevas hospital. That tradition continues to this day, with crystal technology developed for LEP, coupled to electronics developed for the LHC, pointing the way to combined PET/MRI scanners. Its a proud track record by any standards, but we can do better. In the past, the transfer of knowledge and technology between the biomedical professions and physics has been sporadic: based on chance rather than strategy. Thats why CERN hosted a workshop on physics for health on 2-4 February 2010, and charged its participants with drafting a strategy that will ensure that the two communities work more closely together in the future. That workshop was a great success, bringing together some 400 physicists, biologists and healthcare professionals from around the world. These included some of the early pioneers, such as David Townsend, who was a key player in the early days of PET, as well as people at the cutting edge of developments today. The workshop set itself the goal of reviewing progress in the domain of physics applications in life sciences, stimulating exchanges between the different communities and indicating the subjects most suitable for further studies in diagnosis and therapy. The workshop explored synergies between physics and physics spin-offs to fight disease with a focus on radiobiology, accelerators, radioisotope production, detectors and use of IT. The strategy paper is still being deliberated, but I feel sure it will provide a sound blueprint for an ever closer partnership between physics and health.

Where the web was born

Tim Berners-Lee: World-Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather a focus for an extensive community that now includes about 60 countries and about 8000 scientists. Although these scientists typically spend some time on the CERN site, they usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Good contact is clearly essential. The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.

How the web began

Commemorative plague for the invention of the Web

The first proposal for the World Wide Web (WWW) was made at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and further refined by him and Robert Cailliau in 1990. By the end of that year, prototype software for a basic system was already being demonstrated. To encourage its adoption, an interface to the CERN Computer Centre's documentation, to the help service and also to the familiar Usenet newsgroups was provided. The first web servers were all located in European physics laboratories and only a few users had access to the NeXT platform on which the first browser ran. CERN soon provided a much simpler browser, which could be run on any system. In 1991, an early WWW system was released to the high energy physics community via the CERN program library. It included the simple browser, web server software and a library, implementing the essential functions for developers to build their own software. A wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. A little later it was made generally available via the Internet, especially to the community of people working on hypertext systems. Going global The first web server in the United States came on-line in December 1991, once again in a pure research institute: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, very sophisticated but only available on the NeXT machines. The other was the line-mode browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the Internet for other developers to join in. Several individuals wrote browsers, mostly for the X-window system. The most notable from this era are MIDAS by Tony Johnson from SLAC, Viola by Pei Wei from O'Reilly, Erwise by the Finns from the Helsinki University of Technology.

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of their Mosaic browser. This software ran in the X Window System environment, popular in the research community, and offered friendly window-based interaction. Shortly afterwards the NCSA released versions also for the PC and Macintosh environments. The existence of reliable user-friendly browsers on these popular computers had an immediate impact on the spread of the WWW. The European Commission approved its first web project (WISE) at the end of the same year, with CERN as one of the partners. By late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers, and the WWW accounted for 1% of Internet traffic, which seemed a lot in those days! (The rest was remote access, email and file transfer.) 1994 really was the Year of the Web. The worlds First International World Wide Web conference was held at CERN in May. It was attended by 400 users and developers, and was hailed as the Woodstock of the Web. As 1994 progressed, the Web stories got into all the media. A second conference, attended by 1300 people, was held in the US in October, organised by the NCSA and the already created the International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2). By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers, of which 2,000 were commercial, and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added. Open standards An essential point was that the Web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system. In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: WebCore. The goal of the project was an International Consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee officially left CERN at the end of 1994 to work on the Consortium from the MIT base. But with approval of the LHC project clearly in sight, it was decided that further Web development was an activity beyond the Laboratorys primary mission. A new home for basic Web work was needed. The European Commission turned to the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Controls (INRIA), to take over the role of CERN. In January 1995, the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. By 2007 W3C, run jointly by MIT/LCS in the US, INRIA in France, and Keio University in Japan, had more than 430 member organizations from around the world.

How the web works

The Web is a world of information available at the click of a mouse. To use it, you need a computer, a connection to the Internet, and a browser. When you run your browser, it finds and displays pages of information. The function of a Web browser is to interpret the programming language of the web pages (HTML, ) and transform it into the words and graphics that you see on your screen. If you need more information, all you have to do is click on a hyperlink. On each page, certain words, phrases, or even images are highlighted, and clicking on them causes the browser to go off and find another page, which probably contains more highlighted items, and so on. All Web documents are stored on socalled server computers, represented in the image by a factory. Users can inspect these documents by requesting them from their local (personal) computers, represented by the house, and called a client. All computers involved in the Web are connected by the Internet, represented by the roads. When you click on a hyperlink, your computer asks a server computer to return to you a document. For example, starting from the CERN Welcome page in Switzerland your next click might fetch a document from a physics lab at the other side of the world. All the

information seems to be in the little box in front of you, though in reality it is spread over the globe. The web is also friendly to the network: when you click on a piece of highlighted text your browser orders a document from another computer, receives it by return mail and displays it. You are then free to read the new page at leisure, without further consumption of network resources. The Web may be used to initiate processes on either the client or the server. A request can start a database search on a server, returning a synthesised document. A document returned in an unfamiliar format can cause the browser to start a process on the client machine in order to interpret it. The Web's ability to negotiate formats between client and server makes it possible to ship any type of document from a server to a client, provided the client has the appropriate software to handle that format. This makes video, sound and anything else accessible without the need for a single application to be able to interpret everything. The Web and the Internet The Web is not identical to the Internet; it is only one of the many Internet-based communication services. The relation between them may be understood by using the analogy with the global road system. On the Internet, as in the road system, three elements are essential: the physical connections (roads and cables), the common behaviour (circulation rules and Internet protocol) and the services (mail delivery and the WWW). The physical connections: cables and roads Cables are a passive infrastructure, laid down locally by governments and telecoms companies. Cables have different capacity: a single telephone line like the one leading from your home can handle about 7 kilobytes per second, the equivalent of a page of text per second. Optical fibres handle well into the thousand millions of bytes per second. Although the cables may be of different types and the junctions may be very complicated, they are all interconnected. On the roads it is possible for you to drive from home out to a far away place, perhaps in another country, passing from highways to country roads. Similarly, you can find a continuous connection through several interchange nodes between your computer at home and the one of a friend in Australia. The common behaviour: the Internet

Connecting computers to the cables is not enough: to be able to talk to each other they have to agree on a common way of behaving, just like we do when we drive our cars on the roads. The Internet is like the traffic rules: computers must use the cables in an agreed fashion. Thousands of cars can use the same roads even if they all have different destinations; no problems arise as long as on the road everybody drives on one side, stop for red traffic lights and so on. The Internet transfers data in little packets between computers. To use the cables between them profitably, computers must obey rules too: they have to use the same communication protocol. A communication protocol is something you are familiar with if you have ever talked to someone: in a conversation, people know when to start speaking, when to stop, which sounds to make to encourage the other person to continue, and so on. This is an implicit protocol for humans. Computers exchanging data over cables need a similar set of rules for behaviour. To be connected to the Internet, a computer must respect the Internet protocols. It can do so if a compatible layer of software has been installed on it. The common protocol for the Internet is called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol or TCP/IP. Services for everyone Once you have the cables and the protocol to use them, your computer can communicate with all the others. But what can they say to each other? You can use the roads to drive on as an individual, you can run scheduled bus lines, transport heavy goods, you can even run a pizza delivery service. Similarly, on the Internet, you can run data services: electronic mail, file transfer, remote log-in, bulletin boards, The World Wide Web is just one of them, a bit like a parcel delivery service: at your request, the WWW will deliver you the required document.

The website of the world's first-ever web server

1990 was a momentous year in world events. In February, Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison. In April, the space shuttle Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. And in October, Germany was reunified. Then at the end of 1990, a revolution took place that changed the way we live today.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is where it all began in March 1989. A physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a proposal for information management showing how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext, the now familiar point-and-click system of navigating through information. The following year, Robert Cailliau, a systems engineer, joined in and soon became its number one advocate. The idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory. Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between texts on web pages using links. The first examples were developed on NeXT computers. Berners-Lee created a browser-editor with the goal of developing a tool to make the Web a creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext. What should they call this new browser: The Mine of Information? The Information Mesh? When they settled on a name in May 1990, it was the WorldWideWeb. Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information. There are no screenshots of this original page and, in any case, changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed. You may find a later copy (1992) on the World Wide Web Consortium website. However, a website is like a telephone; if there's just one it's not much use. Berners-Lee's team needed to send out server and browser software. The NeXT systems however were far advanced over the computers people generally had at their disposal: a far less sophisticated piece of software was needed for distribution. By spring of 1991, testing was underway on a universal line mode browser, which would be able to run on any computer or terminal. It was designed to work simply by typing commands. There was no mouse, no graphics, just plain text, but it allowed anyone with an Internet connection access to the information on the Web.

The historic NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, on display in the Microcosm exhibition at CERN. It was the first web server, hypermedia browser and web editor. During 1991 servers appeared in other institutions in Europe and in December 1991, the first server outside the continent was installed in the US at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). By November 1992, there were 26 servers in the world, and by October 1993 the figure had increased to over 200 known web servers. In February 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign released the first version of Mosaic, which was to make the Web available to people using PCs and Apple Macintoshes. ... and the rest is Web history. Although the Web's conception began as a tool to aid physicists answer tough questions about the Universe, today its usage applies to various aspects of the global community and affects our daily lives. Today there are upwards of 80 million websites, with many more computers connected to the Internet, and hundreds of millions of users. If households nowadays want a computer, it is not to compute, but to go on the Web.