When the Web was Born

The news this week that Tim Berners-Lee sold an NFT of the source code to the first web server sent me searching through my archives. Yep, I have a copy of the source code only slightly later than the version that was just sold (unsigned, of course). You see, when I worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a colleague came back from a visit to CERN with a copy of Tim's web server on a tape. Soon it was running on the VM mainframe at SLAC that my team managed, the first web server outside of Europe. One of the first things it served was a connection to the Physics Preprints database, which has evolved into today's well-known ArXive database of scientific articles (housed at Cornell where I work today).

Why do I have a preserved copy of that original web server? A few years after the Web's first light, a patent troll surfaced who claimed to have a patent on the technique of searching a database from a web server. Virtually every web server in the world uses that technology, from shopping sites to reservations to libraries, so of course this ended up in court almost immediately. SLAC was drawn into the case because the real inventor of that technique was my friend and colleague George Crane, who had written the Preprints database search.

I spent a long day in a freezing machine room at IBM's Almaden Research Lab pulling disk images off of backup tapes, on the only tape drives left in Silicon Valley that could still read that format of tape. The SLAC Archives came through for the case as well: they located sign-in sheets from the public seminar series where George had described the setup of our web server. The Troll's name was listed as attending a presentation on the technique that he was claiming to patent. Between the tapes, the sign-in sheets, and the testimony of the early web pioneers, the court invalidated the patent claims. A threat to the free growth of the early web was averted.