"CERN is a meeting place for physicists from all over the world, who collaborate on
complex physics, engineering and information handling projects. Thus, the need for the
WWW system arose "from the geographical dispersion of large collaborations, and the
fast turnover of fellows, students, and visiting scientists," who had to get "up to speed
on projects and leave a lasting contribution before leaving."
CERN possessed both the financial and computing resources necessary to start the
project. In the original proposal, Berners-Lee outlined two phases of the project:
First, CERN would "make use of existing software and hardware as well as
implementing simple browsers for the user's workstations, based on an analysis of the
requirements for information access needs by experiments."
Second, they would "extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new
material."
Berners-Lee expected each phase to take three months "with the full manpower
complement": he was asking for four software engineers and a programmer. The
proposal talked about "a simple scheme to incorporate several different servers of
machine-stored information already available at CERN."
Set off in 1989, the WWW quickly gained great popularity among Internet users. For
instance, at 11:22 am of April 12, 1995, the WWW server at the SEAS of the University
of Pennsylvania "responded to 128 requests in one minute. Between 10:00 and 11:00
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