Tim Berners-Lee (British computer scientist and inventor of the Web) will put up for auction the original source code of the www as a non-fungible token (NFT). Therefore, this will be the first time you have decided to financially capitalize on what is considered one of the greatest inventions of our time.
In addition to the source code, A letter from Berners-Lee himself will also be auctioned., a vector file that could be printed on a poster, and a 30-minute video showing the code written directly by Berners-Lee.
For those unfamiliar with NFTs, they should know that they are a type of digital asset designed to show someone's ownership of a unique virtual item, such as images and videos online.
While they have been around for a while, non-fungible tokens (NFTs for short) started gaining traction in early March of this year. This is after Christie's auction house sold an NFT artwork (a collage of images by digital artist Beeple) and shortly after, it was Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, who sold his first tweet for $ 2.9 million.
The auction original source code of the web, titled "This changed everything" will take place in London from June 23 to 30, with auctions starting at $ 1,000. It will be managed by Sotheby's, a British-American multinational auction house for works of art and collectibles. According to Sotheby's, the proceeds from the auction will benefit initiatives that Berners-Lee and his wife will support.
The NFT includes original time-stamped files containing:
- Original archive of files with date and time containing the source code, written between October 3, 1990 and August 24, 1991. These files contain code with approximately 9.555 lines, the content of which includes implementations of the three invented languages and protocols by Sir Tim; HTML (Hypertext Markup Language); HTTP and URI, as well as the original HTML documents that instructed early web users on how to use the application.
- Animated visualization of the code that is being written (video, black and white, silence), with a duration of 30 minutes and 25 seconds.
- A Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) representation of the complete code (A0 841mm wide by 1189mm tall), created by Sir Tim from the original files using Python, with a graphical representation of its physical signature at the bottom right
- A letter written in the README.md file (in "markdown" format) by Sir Tim in June 2021, reflecting the code and its creation process.
The files referenced by the NFT contain code of approximately 9.555 lines, Sotheby's specifies.
Tim Berners-Lee wrote the application in the Objective C programming language and used a NeXT computer to do it.
And is that there may be "infinitely" many copies of the digital object, but only one with the single NFT. This uniqueness can give the item collector's value, like a normal stamp with a rare misprint.
The source code being auctioned will now be the only signed copy of the source code for the world's first browser. In that sense, the object is completely unique. This will be the first time that Berners-Lee will financially capitalize on what is considered one of the greatest inventions of our time.
"Three decades ago, I created something that, with the subsequent help of many collaborators around the world, has been a powerful tool for humanity," Berners-Lee said in a comment statement. “For me, the best thing about the web has been the spirit of collaboration.
Although I do not make predictions about the future, I sincerely hope that its use, knowledge and potential remain open and available to each of us to allow us to continue innovating, creating and initiating the next technological transformation, which we cannot yet imagine. «
He adds that:
“NFTs, whether they be works of art or a digital artifact like this, are the latest playful creations in the web world and the most appropriate proprietary medium out there. Tim Berners-Lee believes that "this is the perfect way to package the origins of the Web." »Will you succeed in a record auction in the current context of the collapse of the NFT market?
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