The World Wide Web began as a proposal its own boss called 'vague'

In March 1989 CERN engineer Tim Berners-Lee submitted a paper on managing information with hypertext links; his supervisor Mike Sendall's only note on it was 'vague, but exciting.' By August 1991 the first website was public, describing the project itself. Berners-Lee and CERN gave up any patent claim, releasing the web royalty-free in 1993.

— Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web — Chapter 1, 1999
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