Recently, the famous Sotheby's auction house announced via Twitter that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist known as the "inventor of the World Wide Web", will be listed on the Ethereum blockchain. Create an NFT of the 30-year-old World Wide Web (WWW, World Wide Web) source code.
The NFT will be auctioned at 2:00 pm Eastern Time on June 23rd, starting at $1,000 on Sotheby’s online on June 23rd, and the auction will end a week later (30th), and the auction proceeds will go to the It is owned by the foundation of Tom and his wife Rosemary.
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Digital posters in the lot
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Pioneering the World Wide Web
As early as the 1960s, the Internet had already begun to take shape. However, due to the huge differences in operating systems and file structures on different computers, the knowledge of information interconnection is only a matter of paper, and cross-platform information files can only be divided into isolated islands independently of each other.
The rudiments of the Internet were born as early as the 1960s, so why wasn't it widely covered?
One of the important reasons is that connecting to the network in the early years required a series of complex operations, and different computers have different operating systems and different file structure formats, so that cross-platform information files can only be divided into isolated island.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, source: Wikipedia
In Tim's vision, Web software not only supports graphic information, but also allows the distribution of audio and video. In 1989, Tim turned his ideas into reality, successfully obtained the software source code of the world's first web browser (World Wide Web) and the first web server, and named it [World Wide Web].
However, the value of the World Wide Web did not receive much attention at that time. In March 1989, Tim submitted a project proposal to CERN, suggesting that hypertext technology (Hypertext) should first be used to connect various laboratories within CERN. Once completed, it can be extended to the whole world. This exciting proposal caused an uproar at CERN, but was initially rejected by superiors.
Tim was not discouraged. He spent 2 months rewording the proposal and finally got it approved. So Tim had a sum of money, bought a NEXT computer, and led a group of assistants to develop the system on it.
The birth of the World Wide Web has opened up a new world for the application of the Internet, and it is the most far-reaching and widest communication medium in human history. It allows people all over the world to communicate with each other on an unprecedented scale. People who are far away, or even people of different generations, don't have to go to the world to find information, and the World Wide Web can get information more quickly than mail, telephone, telegram, or other means of communication.
On December 25, 1990, Tim and French network expert Robert Cailliau successfully demonstrated the first communication between the HTTP proxy and the server based on the Web principle through the Internet at the Western European High Energy Physics Center (CERN) , this technology was quickly promoted to the whole world.
Now the growth rate of the number of WWW sites even exceeds the development speed of the Internet itself. It is estimated that there are more than hundreds of millions of WWW websites in the world, and the number of WWW files may be countless. Each website may contain hundreds or even thousands of independent WWW pages.
The WWW is considered one of the most influential computing inventions in history, and Tim's genius invention won him the 2016 Turing Award. In a statement, Tim said he was both humbled and honored to accept the award, which is named after a computing pioneer who has been awarded to some of the world's brightest minds.
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"The only signed code copy of the first web browser"
Today, Tim chooses to publicly auction the NFT of the source code. It is not a good money-making show that has been delayed for thirty years. Instead, he believes that NFT is the "latest interesting creation" on the World Wide Web and the most suitable way to determine the ownership of digital assets. Way.
Tim, 66, said in a statement:
"30 years ago, I created something that has since become a powerful tool for humanity through the efforts of a large number of collaborators around the world. For me, the best thing about the web is the spirit of collaboration. Although I do not predict the future , but it is my sincere hope that its use, knowledge and potential will remain open for all of us to continue to innovate, create and initiate the next technological change that we cannot yet imagine. Whether it is artwork or digital art like this NFTs are the latest game-changing creations in this space and the most appropriate form of ownership in existence, which is the ideal way to package the origins behind the web."
Sotheby's marketed the collection as "the only signed code copy of what is now the first web browser," positioning it akin to selling celebrity manuscripts.
To review, this piece is called"This Changed Everything"(It changes everything) NFT, will include:
Source code files containing original timestamps;
Visual video demonstration of about 9,500 lines of code;
A letter by Sir Tim describing the creation of the code and some reflections;
poster"poster"；
As advertised by auction house Sotheby's, it is "the first man-made object with a digital lineage" ever to be auctioned. Without WWW, there would be no NFT. This great invention will eventually mark the Internet age by itself.
