What you need to know
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web.
- He is selling his source code for it as an NFT.
- Proceeds will "benefit initiatives that Sir Tim and Lady Berners-Lee support."
Any internet historians or NFT collectors who want to hold ownership over one of the most valuable items in recent memory can do so via the latest crazy NFT auction: This time, the origin of the World Wide Web itself is being put up for grabs.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with the invention of the World Wide Web (as he is the creator of the first web server and browser), has put up his WWW source code for auction. The auction lot doesn't just contain source code, though. The winner will receive four distinct historically significant goodies for their (likely significant) financial investment. Here's what's included:
- Original archive of dated and time-stamped files containing the source code, written between 3 October 1990 and 24 August 1991
- Animated visualization of the code being written (Video, black & white, silent), lasting 30 minutes 25 seconds
- An Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) representation of the full code (A0 841mm wide by 1189 mm high), created by Sir Tim from the original files using Python, with a graphic representation of his physical signature at lower right
- A letter written in the README.md file (in "markdown" format) by Sir Tim in June of 2021, reflecting upon the code and his process of creating it
If you want to see the auction lot's details and consider dropping a bid yourself, you can do so over on Sotheby's site, where the action is set to go down. The auction starts on June 23, 2021, and goes until June 30, 2021, meaning you have a couple of days to gather a ton of money with which to stand a fighting chance against the very wealthy folks likely to be vying for ownership over the origin of the web.
