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Sir Tim Berners-Lee looks at the online world he helped to create and sees a future of more intense, international and creative collaboration amongst more and more people. It’s still early days for the web :

Making the web free to use had a vital role in spreading its use worldwide.

“The experience of the development of the web by so many people collaborating across the globe has just been a fantastic experience,” he said.

“The experience of international collaboration continues. Also the spirit that really we have only started to explore the possibilities of [the web], that continues.”

The ubiquity of the web gives the impression that its success was inevitable but that was not always the case, said Robert Cailliau, who worked alongside Sir Tim.

Mr Cailliau helped draw up one of the early technical proposals for the web and later helped convince the directors at Cern to “give the web away”.

“The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the web was going to be,” he said.

“We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore Cern couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away.”

He said competing technologies, such as Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota, were also offering a method of using hyperlinks to connect documents across computers on the internet.

“If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.”