Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.

Steven Johnson
About This Quote

In the article, Berners-Lee, who won a Turing Award in 2004, describes how his job at CERN, a European particle physics lab, was the perfect place to implement his idea for a universal information system. In fact, he was so lucky that he didn’t know it. He writes: “After two or three years of research and programming into Web technology in 1990-91 I thought that we had made a breakthrough that we could commercialise.” Yet, in his book “Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web” (1999), he doesn’t even mention his time at CERN. Perhaps he considered it irrelevant.

Source: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History Of Innovation

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