The exact birthplace of the web

David Galbraith took the ultimate geek pilgrimage to CERN to discover the exact birth of the web as created by Tim Berners-Lee. There’s a plaque in building 2, but it turns out that the actual work on the code was done in another location.

Tim Berners-Lee clarifies things in some correspondence with David.

I wrote the proposal, and developed the code in Building 31.

I was on the second (in the European sense) floor, if you come out of the elevator (a very slow freight elevator at the time anyway) and turn immediately right you would then walk into one of the two offices I inhabited. The two offices (which of course may have been rearranged since then) were different sizes: the one to the left (a gentle R turn out of the elevator) benefited from extra length as it was by neither staircase nor elevator.

The one to the right (or a sharp R turn out of the elevator) was shorter and the one I started in. I shared it for a long time with Claude Bizeau.

I think I wrote the memo there.

Thanks David for doing the legwork.