Tim Berners-Lee’s source code for the World Wide Web sold Wednesday at Sotheby’s in New York for $ 5.4 million in form of NFT. The work included an animated version of about 10,000 lines of Berners-Lee’s code, and a letter from him.
“Ten years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to do that,” said Cassandra Hatton, vice president of Sotheby’s. Hatton, referring to the work of the World Wide Web, added: “This has changed every aspect of your life” […] “We do not even fully understand the impact it has on our lives and the impact we will continue to have on ours. lives”.
In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee – a physicist turned computer scientist – envisioned an information sharing system that would allow scientists to access data from anywhere in the world. At that time, he was an employee of Cern in Geneva. He called the new World Wide Web (WWW). In 1990 he wrote the program that created the first Internet browser, laying the practical foundation for today’s web.He also invented the URL and the HTML language. He never patented his program but left it freely available to everyone, contributing to its diffusion, in the philosophy of open source, the sacred spirit of freedom that permeates the internet. About 30 years after his invention, Berners-Lee put the original program files up for sale as a collector’s item. At the end of the auction he will receive part of the proceeds from the sale, but he intends to donate all proceeds to charity.
