WWW: The world at your finger tips
M.V.N. Murthy, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai

The World Wide Web, WWW for short, celebrates its 25th birthday this month. In March 1989, computer scientist and physicist Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal which later became the WWW. He was at that time working at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva. The WWW began with a document entitled ``Information Management: A Proposal". The author of the proposal was Tim Berners-Lee. The proposal contained a radical new way of linking and sharing information over the internet. The WWW has changed the way we live, the way we work and even the way we buy things. Simply put, it is one of the greatest invention in human history. 
The figure shows the cover page illustration of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for WWW (reproduced from CERN history of the www page).
The internet is a global system of computer networks which are interconnected. It is actually a network of smaller networks. There are millions of academic, public, business, governmental networks which are linked by an array of optical and wireless networking technologies. The WWW uses the internet to provide access information, so called web pages.
The need for WWW arose from physicists working at CERN laboratory from around the world.The huge amount of data generated by experiments was shared and analysed by these physicists. But they were working on different types of machines. A common platform or medium with its own language for communication was needed to access information and also to put out new information to be shared by all those working at CERN. This is what Tim Berners-Lee and his group at CERN did- they devised a language called HTML (hyper-text markup language) and a commonly agreed way of transferring information called http (hyper-text transfer protocol). The documents or information is itself stored on Web Servers.
The first web server was created on the NeXT computer used by Berners-Lee at CERN. The very first web-page created had information about the WWW itself, and the rest of the information followed with regular updates. In order to facilitate a unique address to identify resources on the web, a universal identifier system called URL (universal Resource Locator) was devised. The combination of address (URL), language (HTML) and communication (HTTP) completed the basic structure of a world-wide-web.
Soon a second web server was set up outside Europe at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the USA in 1991 to serve as information exchange for high energy physicists all around the world. Today there are millions of websites on the internet providing all possible information, applications, and what not.
The inventor of WWW, Berners-Lee was born on 8 June 1955 in London. He was educated at the Queen's College of the University of Oxford. He worked for a short time at CERN in 1979-80 and returned as Fellow to CERN in 1984. It was here in 1989, Berners-Lee invented the WWW. This is described in his own words:
I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and [there] the World Wide Web ... Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the world wide web consortium at MIT to enable organisations to create standards to improve the web. What is even more remarkable is that Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent (see box) and no royalties due to him or the organisation CERN that made it available free to the world. Furthermore, the World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards should be based on royalty-free technology, so that they could easily be adopted by anyone.
Berners-Lee's work has been recognised by numerous awards which includes Millennium Technology Prize, Fellow of Royal Society and he has been Knighted by the Queen. He has been inducted to the Internet Hall of Fame.
Patently Absurd
Can you imagine how much money Berners-Lee and CERN would have made if they had patented the idea of WWW? At a conservative estimate it may have run into billions of dollars over years. But they did not. The invention and its improvements are available free to all. One of the most important life changing inventions in recent times is enjoyed by all for free. This is all the more surprising in a world where scientists and technologists are craving for patenting their inventions.
What is the meaning of a patent? A patent gives a set of exclusive rights to the inventor or an organisation for a limited period of time. This gives the inventor the right to prevent others from making, using, selling, importing, or distributing a patented invention without permission and payment. Such a right is granted, as a matter of principle, to encourage inventions, to allow the inventor to recover the investments and make some profit. However, in practice it is one of the most abused rights.
The absurdity of a patent arises from the fact that no invention is made in isolation. A whole body of freely available scientific and technical knowledge that is freely available is used in any invention. It is even more difficult to justify the craze for patents in public funded institutions where scientists are paid by tax payers money to conduct research. Such a research best belongs to public domain. 
For example, a new life saving drug is brought to the market. A whole lot of the chemistry of the compounds, its biological effects are to some extent already public knowledge. Not only such a drug is patented, often the given time period is extended by making small changes at the end of the period. This problem is rampant both in drugs and increasingly in agricultural field where a lot of historical knowledge is already available on seeds and crops. Small changes induced by using knowledge genetics are patented thus preventing their wide use.
The whole idea of patent goes against the universal nature of science and its uses for public good. While it is difficult to deny the credit for an invention, the patent regime borders on being unethical because by conferring the rights only on the inventor it does not recognise prior knowledge.
In the light of these, it is an extra-ordinary gesture that Berners-Lee made WWW available for free to every one emphasising the best practice of science.