Scoop – World Wide Web invented

It was twenty five years ago that Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN came up with a technology that would revolutionise communication – it was based on hypertext markup language (HTML) – and they gave it the rather unwieldy name of the World Wide Web.

It was just under twenty five years ago that a wet-behind-the-ears science journalist pitched a story to perhaps the most popular of popular science magazines in the UK. The pitch was about a new technology that was being developed by scientists at CERN that would revolutionise communication…

Unfortunately, for said rookie science journalist, he was not persuasive enough and was told by the desk editor at the magazine that all this html and www nonsense sounded like nothing more than shuffling files around on computers and that we already had FTP, the file-transfer protocol, to do that. And the pitch was spiked.

How short-sighted that editor was. How frustrated that young science journalist with his world-changing scoop was…

…oh well.
