The original inventor of the World Wide Web has auctioned off a signed copy of the original source code as an NFT.
Tim Berners-Lee will auction off the digitally signed documents, which consist of the 9,555 lines of code that make up the building blocks of the internet as we know it, a moving visualisation of this code, a letter that described how he created it and a “digital poster” of the code itself.
The auction house Sotheby’s have overseen the auction throughout late June under the name “This Changed Everything”, with bids that started at £720 ($1000) but quickly entered the millions.
Mr Berners-Lee has said that any proceeds from the auction will be donated to charitable initiatives supported by him and his wife.
It is being sold as a Non-Fungible Token, which uses blockchain technology to show the ownership of unique, one-of-a-kind digital works.
It is important to note, however, that the actual source code is available to everyone to freely use and freely change through an open-source license, which makes the NFT version more of a curiosity than access to exclusive knowledge or code.
The World Wide Web as Mr Berners-Lee designed and envisioned it was made up of three main technologies:
- Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) – A webpage file type that allows for text to link to other websites or parts of other pages.
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTML) – The system used to transmit information and web pages from one computer or server to another.
- Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) – A way of tracking and retrieving information from a network along with Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and Uniform Resource Names (URNs).
Mr Berners-Lee would finish this work in 1989 and would later create the first-ever web browser, also titled WorldWideWeb (later Nexus) in 1990.
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