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 world’s 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 world’s 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 Franco–Swiss border near Geneva.
It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 20 Member States.
CERN’s 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 CERN’s main mission
remains essentially the same.
The Convention also states that CERN shall organize and sponsor international co-
operation 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 CERN’s 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 government’s 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 CERN’s 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
Organization’s 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: Frédérick 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 Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, 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 CERN’s 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 CERN’s 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 CERN’s 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 decision-
making procedures of the Organization.
Scientists from some 608 institutes and universities around the world use CERN’s
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 world’s particle physicists
CERN employs just under 2400 people. The Laboratory’s 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 world’s 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, that’s 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 doesn’t 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 CERN’s 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.” Charpak’s multiwire proportional chamber, invented in 1968,
and his subsequent developments launched the era of fully electronic particle detection.
Charpak’s 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
Electron–Positron 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/ψ 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 today’s 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 world’s 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 today’s 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 today’s world of
competition. Fundamental science has a vital role to play in the process of innovation. In
today’s 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 Wideröe 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 world’s 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
Geneva’s 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.
It’s 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. That’s 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, e-
mail and file transfer.) 1994 really was the ‘Year of the Web’. The world’s 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
Laboratory’s 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 so-
called 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 Urbana-
Champaign 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.