How Physicists and Programmers Played Important Roles in Shaping the Current Wave of Globalization

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Thirty years after the World Wide Web first expanded from Europe to North America, Michael Riordan reveals how physicists and programmers played important roles in shaping the current wave of globalization.

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In December 1991 Paul Kunz, a physicist and computer programmer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California, set up the very first Web server in North America. I learned of it about a month later, upon returning to SLAC from a year in Washington, DC. “Have you seen the latest?” an enthusiastic colleague asked. “It’s called the World Wide Web!”

Read on to discover the historical significance of that moment.