

Ranking CERN's products. #1, WWW. #2, Higgs boson. - waderoush
http://www.xconomy.com/national/2012/07/06/what-the-higgs-boson-owes-to-the-world-wide-web/

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keithpeter
Hypertext was 'in the air', Nelson had introduced the idea and there were
commercial hypertext systems available. The Gopher protocol was almost there.
I think _something_ like the Web would have happened around the time anyway.
Sir Tim got there first, and provided half a hypertext system (forward links
but no back links until blog systems with track-back) that was 'open' as we
would say now. Built on a Unix like system and free for distribution, so low
friction on adoption.

Only a few sites in the world could/can do the Higgs experiment, and the US
decided to leave the game in the 1990s. Therefore I respectfully disagree.

Food for thought: what would the Web look like if Microsoft had developed the
first public distributed hypertext system?

