The original files including the source code and idea sketches for the World Wide Web will be auctioned.

As the auction house Sotheby's has now announced, the auction will start next week.

It includes the original files with a time stamp, an animated visualization of the code, a letter from web inventor Tim Berners-Lee with his thoughts on the project and a digital poster of the code including the author's autograph.

The first bid will be $ 1,000.

The expected proceeds will be used to support various initiatives of the family of the web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

The auction is part of a series of spectacular auctions of groundbreaking technical products from the 20th century.

Stephan Finsterbusch

Editor in business.

  • Follow I follow

    At the end of the 1980s, the British physicist set about developing a so-called hypertext system as part of a project at the European research institute CERN in Geneva.

    Originally, scientists should be able to exchange the results of their work quickly and easily with it.

    Berners-Lee presented his project to CERN in March 1989.

    It was well received by his colleagues.

    A year later he wrote the code in the computer language "Objective-C" on a NeXT computer.

    Shortly afterwards, today's World Wide Web (WWW) emerged from his work, a milestone not only in the history of technology.

    9555 lines

    Now the web creator is bringing the founding documents of his work to the market through one of the largest auction houses in the world. “The web is the brainchild of one of the greatest thinkers Britain has ever spawned,” said Oliver Barker, Chairman of Sotheby's Europe. "It's a really great British invention - one that has literally gone global." The web's original source code was a total of 9555 lines. Berners-Lee wrote it between 1990 and 1991. To this day they bear the timestamp from the days of their creation.

    In the past few years, Berners-Lee has repeatedly voiced criticism of the tendencies towards centralization, commercialization and censoring of the web. Since 2015 he has been working on a project called “Solid”, with which he wants to bring the web closer to its origins. In April of this year he contacted Sotheby's to have the founding documents auctioned. For Sotheby's it's a coup, for Berners-Lee it's a farewell.

    He had saved his old files in a special packing program called a tar file.

    This means that files and directories can first be written to a single file and then completely restored from it.

    Sotheby's is also using a special crypto technology for the auction of this digital treasure: non-fungible tokens (NFT).

    While fungibility ensures that units of a countable or measurable good are interchangeable, non-fungibility stands for the opposite.

    Blockchain makes it possible

    In this way, an NFT can clearly document ownership and origin.

    It can thus be used like a digital certificate of authenticity.

    Copying a file does not prevent it.

    Despite many copies, only one file can be considered the origin.

    Since a non-fungible token clearly documents the origin, it ensures which file is the original.

    The tokens used by Sotheby's are to be generated in a smart contract on the blockchain of the Ethereum platform.

    Berners-Lee commented, “NFTs, whether for works of art or a digital artifact like this, are the newest playful creations in this realm (technology) and the most appropriate forms of ownership out there.

    They are the ideal way to package the origins of the web. "

    NFTs are booming: Christie's auction house recently sold an NFT-linked copy of a collage by digital artist Beeple for almost $ 70 million. The work was packed in a Jpeg format with 21,069 × 21,069 pixels and certified by token. More than 20 million people had followed the last few minutes of the auction on the Internet - more than ever before. That caught on: since then, tech billionaires have been selling their NFT-marked Twitter tweets for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The good old Nyan Cat, the ten-year-old internet phenomenon of the 12-frame GIF animation of a flying cat, was also sold this way - for more than half a million dollars.

    In addition, groundbreaking products from the history of technology in the 20th century are currently in great demand. Three years ago, one of the first Apple computers was auctioned for $ 375,000. In England, a 70-year-old photo camera from Leica has just found a new owner for 4,008,000 euros. The prototype of a “Playstation” video console jointly developed by Sony and Nintendo in the early 1990s went under the hammer for a quarter of a million euros. The reason: the model is unique. Because of a dispute between the two companies, it never went into mass production. In the case of Tim Berners-Lee's WWW files, for example, the opening bid of $ 1,000 is likely to skyrocket. The auction starts on June 23rd and will last for a week.