The father of the World Wide Web will auction the code …

Tim Berners-Lee, the father of Internet, has decided to put the original source code up for sale at an auction to be held at Sotheby’s. The triple W It is the element that allows you to navigate in one of the creations that have defined the course of humanity: the Internet.

The source code will be sold as a non-fungible token (NFT), i.e. as a digital file, a format that generated high bids in the last auctions, and it can be offered from a thousand dollars. Berners-Lee and his wife will use the profits for initiatives they deem important. This is the first time that the computer scientist has made money for his creation, since he never patented his development in 1989, which would have made him a billionaire.

The auction is expected to last a week: June 23-30. The NFT comprises 9,555 lines of code with implementations of the three languages ​​and protocols created by Berners-Lee: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and URI (Uniform Resource Identifiers). In addition, original HTML documents are included which educate early web users on its use.

How much can you get in a format like NFT?

In March, a work by artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold on NFT for almost $ 70 million.

There’s more: the buyer will also have the digital signature of the Ethereum blockchain (a unique digital asset that certifies the ownership of NFTs), in addition to an animated display, a letter written by Berners-Lee and A digital poster of the complete code from the original files.

Why a TVN? Well, it’s a natural thing. When you’re a computer scientist writing code, it feels good to digitally sign my autograph on an all-digital artifact, ”said Berners-Lee. Beyond what can be obtained at auction, the WWW code has historical value, and this is the importance of its realization during the lifetime of its creator, who took the initiative.

Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955 and invented the World Wide Web in 1989, which allowed an acceleration of the flow of information unlike anything seen since the founding of the printing press. Today, the computer scientist is dedicated to Solid, a kind of new Internet, more respectful of private life and unaware of the centralization of giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google. Berners-Lee created the company Inrupt for this purpose, which launched the first server of the new system at the end of 2020, in which users own their data and decide to share it and with whom.