From a Hunch, To a Side Project, To This

It was 1856 in Victorian London when Houlston & Sons published a how-to guide to domestic life.

Enquire Within Upen Everything (Google books) was full of charming and enlightening stuff like etiquette, parlour games, and cake recipes. Classic English.

Little did they know, it would go on to change the course of history 120 years later.

The early book, containing 3000+ pithy descriptions of domestic wisdom, took off and the 1962 annual sold 196,000 copies. The 126th (and final edition) was published in 1976 (the year I was born) having sold millions of editions.

In 1980, a mathematician working as an independent software consultant in a Swiss research lab, was overwhelmed by the flow of information in the organisation. So he tinkered with a little side project to track all the data that connected the projects with the people in the network. He called it Enquire, in homage to the old Victoran compendium he’d unearthed 10 years prior.

But he soon changed jobs and dropped the side project, abandoning the source code altogther.

It was another 10 years later that he decided to rekindle the idea of connecting computers using hypertext links. Yet he struggled to find a good name for it.

The Mine? The Mesh?

It became available to the public on 23rd August 1991.

25 years ago today.

The name he settled on was the World Wide Web.

Turns out the internet we have today didn't come from a spark of genius, but a slow hunch that took decades to crystallize​ in the mind of TBL.