If Sardinia was (and in some ways still is) the capital of the Italian web (as Pisa is of the Internet), it is due to the fact that it happened on November 30, 1990. That day in Cagliari the statute of the Center was deposited. Research Development and Higher Education Sardinia, known as CRS4. To give an idea of the relevance, the first president was the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics Carlo Rubbia. That day the first board of directors met and another key figure of CRS4, Paolo Zanella, was appointed CEO. He was a physicist from CERN, the large research center in Geneva at the time directed by Rubbia at the time when a young British researcher, Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web. Years later Zanella will say: “It was fortunate for me to know Tim Berners-Lee, who proposed the World-Wide Web to me in 1988, at the end of my term as Director of the IT division of CERN: two years later we already had the prototype of the Web “. In 1989 Zanella was called by Tarcisio Teofilatto, an engineer “with extraordinary experience in the field of information technology“, who had been commissioned by the president of Sardinia Mario Melis to allow the region to find a new alternative development model to chemistry in crisis. The idea for the Center came from the councilor for programming Franco Mannoni who, probably at the beginning of 1990, had personally visited Rubbia in Geneva to convince him to assume the presidency (“He loved us and accepted our proposals”).
According to another version, the first conversation was instead with Paolo Zanella who then spoke about it with Rubbia. Zanella again remembers the third key figure in this story: “To define the proposal I asked a Pietro Zanarini to help me. We worked in the cellar of the CERN, the equivalent of the classic California garage “.
Without CRS4 there would not have been many things, starting with Video On Line and Tiscali, but also the first webmail in the world, the first European online newspaper and in general a tireless forge of innovation. It was no accident. The statute stated that the Center would deal (it was 1990, let’s remember) of “cellular robotics, technology and methodologies for parallel software, applied mathematics and numerical analysis, modeling in ecometry, modeling for the structure of matter, high-speed telecommunications , advanced optics, computational chemistry, industrial automation and assisted design “. To quote one of the promoters, it was a piece of CERN transplanted to Cagliari. And still today it is something to be proud of every day.
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