World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee poses for a photograph following a speech at the Mozilla Festival 2018 in London, Britain October 27, 2018. Picture taken Oct. 27, 2018. (File photo from REUTERS)
LONDON — The original source code for the World Wide Web that was written by its inventor Tim Berners-Lee is up for sale at Sotheby’s as part of a non-fungible token, with bids starting at just $1,000.
Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist, invented the World Wide Web in 1989, revolutionizing the sharing and creation of information in what is seen as one of the most significant inventions since the printing press appeared in Europe in 15th Century Germany.
The digitally signed Ethereum blockchain non-fungible token (NFT), a one-of-a-kind digital asset that records ownership, includes the original source code, an animated visualization, a letter written by Berners-Lee, and a digital poster of the full code from the original files.
NFTs have exploded in popularity in recent months, including at auction. A digital-only artwork by American artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold for nearly $70 million at Christie’s in March.
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“Why an NFT? Well, it’s a natural thing to do … when you’re a computer scientist and when you write code and have been for many years,” Berners-Lee said in a statement. “It feels right to digitally sign my autograph on a completely digital artifact.”
The files contain 9,555 lines of code including implementations of the three languages and protocols invented by Berners-Lee: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers).
