Information Management: A Proposal. March, 1989

Hey Folks,

Last week after GDC Joe, Bengo and I went on a tour of CERN, which was
excellent and highly recommended for multiple reasons.

I will just touch on one now. Which is the memo written by Tim Berners-Lee
in 1989 to others at CERN.

https://cds.cern.ch/record/369245/files/dd-89-001.pdf

It is a piece of history and part of the origin story of the world wide web
and the standards that we all work on and with here at the W3C. 20 pages
long, but not dense at all. Well worth your time.

There are lots of gems in here, but I want to draw attention to one in case
folks don't have time for the full paper.

Discussions on Hypertext have sometimes tackled the problem of copyright
> enforcement and data security. These are of secondary importance at CERN,
> where information exchange is still more important than secrecy.
> Authorisation and accounting systems for hypertext could conceivably be
> designed which are very sophisticated, but they are not proposed here. In
> cases where reference must be made to data which is in fact protected,
> existing file protection systems should be sufficient.


This was listed as a non-requirement.

Fascinating stuff.

Thanks to Bengo for digging out this memo!

All the best,
Will