On November 12, 1990, CERN engineers Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau sent lab managers Peter Innocenti, Gerard Kellner and David Williams an eleven-page document titled “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project.” It rewrote Berners-Lee’s vaguer 1989 memo into a concrete plan: hire staff, buy NeXT workstations, and build a working hypertext system linking CERN’s documents within six months.

The proposal is what turned a “vague but exciting” idea, as Berners-Lee’s supervisor Mike Sendall had called it the year before, into funded work. Within weeks Berners-Lee had built the first browser, server and web address scheme on a single NeXT computer, the direct ancestor of an internet that now reaches most of the globe, though a stubborn digital divide still leaves billions offline.

Berners-Lee’s plan treated information as a web of links anyone could follow in any direction, not a filing cabinet with one correct path to each drawer. That same idea, connection without a fixed hierarchy, now carries the cloud computing traffic, Wi-Fi signals and artificial intelligence tools people use every day.