Many publications are celebrating the tenth anniversary of the browser this week. I was at Bell Labs at the time and remember using Mosaic an hour or so after its release. It is clear that it changed things, but I think Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, is a much more interesting person than anyone on the Mosaic team.
The European Particle Physics Lab CERN is the largest of a half dozen particle physics laboratories worldwide. This sort of experimental physics has become very expensive and collaborations can exceed 500 and have lives that span a decade or more.
The natural size of a collaboration is much smaller than 500 - it is much smaller than 100. My thesis adviser said (only half joking) that the Nobel Prize, when awarded in experimental particle physics, is largely a recognition of superb management.
I did particle physics in the days when most experiments had 10 to 50 experimenters from a half dozen institutions. We ran into real problems of standardization. Sharing data and analysis programs was important, but the institutions had very little in the way of standards. Particle physics has tended to be at the frontier of data processing and analysis and the experimenters, along with a special breed of computer scientists who hover around this sort of work, tended to make things up as they were required (they are still doing this)
Tim Berners-Lee was an Oxford graduation who spent time at CERN. Among other things he built a decentralized system that would communicate using a common denominator (TCP/IP over the Internet) and would require very little work from the users to become part of the system.
Folklore has it that the management at CERN ignored it, but he spent enough time to write a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and an addressing scheme he called uniform resource identifiers (URIs - now called uniform resource locators or URLs). In 1991 he wrote a client allow inexperienced users to access information to which they could also add. A group could share information at all of their locations - competing groups could share information. He called the client WorldWideWeb because it really was.
I remember using WorldWideWeb in 1991. Most of the information was relevant to particle physics, but I was still reading the preprints. The hypertext organization allowed reasonable navigation - no one told Breners-Lee or its physicist users that the community of computer interface designers had largely discarded hypertext.
It was very useful - I still remember the address http://info.cern.ch ... I think I used a browser called Samba, but can't remember clearly. Breners-Lee did all of his work on the NeXT box, but anyone with a client and an Internet connection could use it. That was revolutionary and it became popular in the physics community. I wish that I could have envisioned a greater use, but I didn't.
Larry Smarr at NCSA was the guy who saw the need to give it a graphical interface. It is interesting to note that at least one company who was giving funding to Smarr's group saw very early results and walked from them. The chief scientist of one company knew that it was a waste of time because he was part of the academic community that discounted hypertext. It is even more remarkable that the chief scientist was later given a very powerful role as a visionary (where he subsequently failed), but that is a digression..
6:16:48 AM 
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