Twenty years ago today, when Vanilla IceÕs ÒIce Ice BabyÓ was at the top of the charts, two engineers at CERNÕs data handling division requested funding for the research project that would give birth to the web.

The proposal, submitted by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau on November 12, 1990, laid out what they wanted to build and the resources theyÕd require. The team wanted to start by building a browser and a server. They estimated development would take six months, and that it would require Òfour software engineers and a programmer.Ó There are also some serious hardware requirements totaling tens of thousands of dollars (or is it Swiss francs?), but about a third of the requested funding was dedicated to software user licenses.

HereÕs the overview:

    The attached document describes in more detail a Hypertext project. HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.

MOM!!! HAPPY WEB ANNIVERSARY!!!!