Visiting CERN February 2025

Earlier this week I had a paper accepted to be presented at the ECREA Communication History Workshop ‘Communication Networks Before and After the Web: Historical and Long-term Perspectives’. It is always nice to present a paper in an academic workshop, but for a web historian like me this time it is particularly interesting because the workshop will take place at CERN near Geneva, “where the World Wide Web took its first steps between the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s”, to quote the organisers. CERN is the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and I am therefore very much looking forward to this unique opportunity to be at the premises where it all started.

The title of my presentation is ‘Priming for the web: Pre-histories of the Danish web’, and here is the abstract I submitted:

‘It is fair to say that the history of the Danish web starts in 1992 when the first web server is established in Denmark (Christensen-Dalsgaard, 2005, p. 329). From the mid-1990ies the Danish web grows from 4.684 registered web domains in 1996 to 248.727 in 2000. However, the Danish web does not emerge out of nowhere. From the beginning of the 1980ies computer networks had been part of the Danish cultural imaginary, and people outside of academia had familiarised themselves with different forms of computer networks. Because of this ‘priming’ the web could easily ‘stick’ to the minds and lives of prospect users when introduced in 1992.

This paper is part of the research project ‘Histories of the Danish web in the 1990ies’ (see webhistorie.dk), and it addresses the question of how early computer networks were introduced to a wider public, thus priming for the success of the web. The paper is based on desk studies of documents, and interviews. Focus is on three streams of priming:

(1) Cultural imaginary’: Inspired by Jensen (1993) and Balbi (2023) the cultural imaginary of computer networks from 1980 to 1993 is identified by studying (a) three mainstream national newspapers (Berlingske Tidende, Politiken, Information), (b) two popular computer magazines (Computerworld, Ingeniøren), (c) and relevant TV-commercials, film and literature. The analysis uncovers the fluctuating shifts in terms, metaphors and semantic content related to ‘computer network’.

(2) Teledata and Diatel: In 1982-84 the Danish telephone companies launched Teledata, a test project for a national computer network for domestic use. Teledata was inspired by the English Viewdata and Prestel, and the French Minital (Schafer & Thierry, 2012; Mailland & Driscoll, 2017), and it ran in two Danish cities (Silkeborg and Lyngby) where households, companies and libraries were equiped with the needed hardware. After 1984 the experiences led to the development of the high profiled full-scale national computer network Diatel, that was launched in 1993, but was quickly outcompeted by the web and was closed in 1996. Teledata was too early while Diatel was too late.

(3) Experiences with international networks: From the late 1980ies Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) (Driscoll, 2022) as well as emails became widespread in Denmark, initially among tech-savy people, but later they were taken up by wider groups as a broader mass medium. Email and BBS were where Danes experienced a computer network for the first time.

Finally, the intersections of the three streams and their concrete ways of being refered to when the web is introduced are highlighted. The paper contributes to general discussions about the origin(s) of the web, and it constitutes the first academic study of the three pre-histories to the Danish web.

You can read more about the event here.