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feature: The lost souls of telecommunications history

// February 8th, 2010 // Tech News

When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva’s celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, he’d been hired to help replace the control systems for several of the lab’s particle accelerators. Almost immediately, the inventor of the modern Web page noticed a problem: thousands of people were coming and going from the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires.  “The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground,” he later wrote. “Much of the crucial information existed only in people’s heads.” In his spare time, Berners-Lee was working on some software that might alleviate this fragmentation and spread more useful information around. It was a little program he named Enquire, and it allowed users to create “nodes”—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages.  Berners-Lee was pleased with what he eventually produced, but the PASCAL application ran on CERN’s obscure and proprietary operating system, so he didn’t take it with him when his contract expired.