On this day in 1990, physicist Tim Berners-Lee circulated a memo for a relatively modest information sharing proposal that would go on to revolutionise commerce, writes Eliot Wilson

At 35, Tim Berners-Lee was a fellow at the particle physics laboratory CERN. A physicist by training, he had become interested in computer networking and how organisations shared information. He understood the implication of Sir Isaac Newton’s dictum, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, and realised that access to data for scientists from different departments, institutions and even countries was the cornerstone of successful research.

In March 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memorandum entitled “Information Management: A Proposal”. It addressed the challenge of keeping track of the vast amount of data a leading laboratory like CERN produced; his solution was “a ‘web’ of notes with links (like references) between them” which could accommodate any kind of information and required no major technological advances. As he observed later: “Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already.”

Berners-Lee gave the proposal to his boss, Mike Sendall, head of........

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