From June 23 to June 30, Sotheby’s will put up for sale the 9,555 lines of source code that underlie the World Wide Web. The code will be sold as an NFT commodity (a non-fungible NFT token on the blockchain network, which confirms its authenticity and ownership.
The code was written by British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee between 1990 and 1991. The buyer can access the files through the NFT, which will contain links where the files can be viewed on the Internet or downloaded to a computer. The winning bidder will also receive an email from Berners-Lee containing “thoughts on the code and the process of building it,” as well as a 30-minute video describing the process of writing the code.
Three decades ago, I created something that, with the help of a huge number of employees around the world, became a powerful tool for humanity. For me, the best thing about the Internet is the collaborative spirit. While I do not make predictions about the future, I sincerely hope that its use, knowledge and potential will remain open and available to all of us to continue to innovate, create and initiate the next technological transformations that we cannot yet imagine. NFTs, whether they are works of art or similar digital artifacts, are the latest creations in the field and the most appropriate means of ownership in existence. It’s the perfect way to package the origins of the internet.
Tim Berners-Lee
While at the CERN Research Laboratory in the late 1980s, Berners-Lee proposed an information management system that his boss described as “vague but addictive.” Berners-Lee eventually wrote implementations for the three languages and protocols that fill most of the 9,555 lines of code up for auction. The code listed at Sotheby’s also contains the original HTML documents that served as the user’s guide.
Bets will start at $ 1,000. According to Sotheby’s, the proceeds will go to “initiatives” supported by Berners-Lee and his wife, Rosemary Leith.
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