A Physicist in Switzerland Accidentally Invented the Future

On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist working at CERN in Switzerland, published the first website on the World Wide Web. It was a plain page with black text on a grey background explaining what the World Wide Web was and how to use it. There were no images. No styling. No ads, pop-ups, cookie consent banners, newsletter modals, or autoplaying videos. Just text and hyperlinks — the idea that you could click a word and be taken somewhere else. It was, in retrospect, the last moment the internet would ever be that clean. Berners-Lee made a decision that would define the next three decades: he didn't patent it. He gave it away. The web was built as a tool for physicists to share research papers, and he wanted it to remain open. This single act of generosity enabled everything that followed — the good (Wikipedia, open-source software, global communication) and the bad (everything else). The web was born without a business model, which meant everyone else would spend the next thirty years trying to bolt one on, with consequences Berners-Lee has spent his later career trying to fix.