teresa@capeeyes.com - In some ways, it was the equivalent of a mustard seed. It was just a document, just some words on paper, words that reflected the ongoing operating principles of CERN, the European research center for understanding how the universe works.

The date was April 30, 1993. The document put an information management system CERN developed into the public domain. And that small act changed history.

In one simple filing, CERN released its intellectual property rights to work that had started in early 1989 with a paper entitled Information Management: A Proposal. But not only did CERN release its rights, it also ensured that no one else could claim them. The work created by Tim Burners-Lee and CERN was free.

30 April 1993.CERN put the World Wide Web in the public domain.

I can’t understate the importance of this moment.

We all know that the technical development that created the concept of URLs and HTML and the other elements of the web was inspired work. But it was this one small legal release that made the web truly belong to the world.

We all know that the best technology often disappears from use. Elegant solutions, approaches that make sense … history is littered with them. What is the trigger that moves the idea and its implementation into daily use?

For information, it was the decision by CERN to extend its operating principle of shared knowledge to this IT project it had developed. Instead of talking about “monetizing,” or fretting about returns to investors or ongoing revenue streams, it instead opened its system - a system designed for managing the flow between databases and computers around the globe via the Internet - to everyone and anyone.

The project began in March 1989, with the afore mentioned proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. By Dec 1990 “the web” was up and running complete with HTTP protocol, URLs, HTML markup

The issue CERN struggled with - enabling information sharing - was hardly unique and other solutions like Archie (a database of FTP servers for UNIXheads), WAIS (wide area information server, developed by Thinking Machines Inc. for indexing and searching document indexes) and Gopher (a simple menu approach to accessing information developed by the University of Minnesota) were a few of the popular options.

The (relatively) easy to user Gopher was spreading like wildfire too. People were hungry for better ways to get to all this information that had been opened by up the Internet. Remember how cool it was to find a new server out there somewhere? I still remember getting the giggles when I was sitting on a computer in Boulder CO, looking at English language documents on a server in China. The notion of time and distance and collaboration was just getting turned on it head!

The time and distance and collaboration equation has continued to shift and the applications on the web have grow almost beyond measurement. But how many Gopher servers do you see today? The reason is that date: April 30 1993.

Earlier in the same year, the University of Minnesota made a business decision that, in parallel with CERN’s decision, would define history. The University started charging for Gopher servers.

In 1994, Gopher grew by nearly 1000 percent. In 1994 the Web grew by 34,000 percent. Compare and contrast.

In 1995, the global standards movement continued to grow, and Berners-Lee moved to Cambridge to lead the World Wide Web Consortium, hosted at MIT.

Today? Well, you live the results every day. And the world’s first web site, http://info.cern.ch, is still up and running. From a small mustard seed, great trees do indeed grow.