CERN CN Division - Historical Documents

Here are some scans of CERN Computing Division documents from the early 90s, from my personal archive. The scans are of the parts that relate to work on the World Wide Web, since these are most likely to be of historical interest.

The first is an extract from the AS Division Programme of Work, dated May 17, 1991. This mentions Pollermann, Berners-Lee, Cailliau and Pellow.

The second is from the same document, and describes plans for "The Hypertext or World-Wide-Web project":

and the following page:

The AS Programme of Work document shown above was prepared for the Division's yearly "Programme of Work" management meeting, which was usually held outside CERN in a hotel and lasted a couple of days. (In 1991 it was held in Cordon in the Alps - I recall the hotel as being very quaint and having a cosy bar with an excellent selection of vintage liqueres. The hotel was selected by Jacques Spalter.) The following document shows part of a summary of the final day's discussion from the 1991 meeting. One of the bullet points under "Minor Points" is "X-browser for WWW would require 1 Timyear, but is considered important".

 

 

The next document is the AS Programme of Work from September 30th. 1992. The first page, shown below, describes how "The WWW information system has been one of the attractions of CHEP92 and is becoming very popular, in particular outside CERN." (CHEP92 was the "Computing in High Energy Physics" conference.) This is followed by the usual complaints about lack of effort which were a common feature of such documents at the time.

 

Here is the part describing the work of the section that included Berners-Lee, Goossens and Pollermann:

 

... this is all I have time to scan at the moment.