314
It is May 25, 1994 and the first world wide web conference is held at CERN in Geneva. In this video, the beginning of the conference on the “future of the web” by Tim Berners-Lee, CERN researcher and co-founder (together with Robert Cailliau) of the network that we use every day today and which at the time had yet to revolutionize. Internet. There is a moment of embarrassment because the Berners-Lee slide projector throws a tantrum, but everything is resolved in a short time and the presentation can begin (here the integral).
Among the more than three hundred scientists who came from all over the world to participate in the conference, there is a large group of Italians. One of these, Gioacchino La Vecchia (from the University of Pisa), told us about that experience: “We weren’t there by chance. At the Computer Science Department of Pisa, a group of students from the Degree Course had given the name of Gruppo Virgilio, it explored this new way of publishing and exchanging information on the Internet. The “Gruppo Virgilio”, born as a techno-logistic support of the Pantera movement, later became an experimental research group of the Department. In the basement of the Department we had a corner with a Linux PC and an Internet connection and we started exploring the world of the Web. So when Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee gathered the pioneers of the Web, we couldn’t miss them. They accepted us as volunteers and made us participate in the event for free in exchange for help in organizing. Robert and Tim were certain that something huge was being born that would change the world and during the event this and it became a certainty. The Web had been baptized and from then on nothing would have been the same again “.