Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines. What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was a graphical workstation, and not spread world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around -- certainly not "western equivalent" eastern europeans.

Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. a universally world-wide. Nobody was astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic. They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given away without charge.

WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of.

CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Veltman to learn more about CERN, if you feel to downvote.

Basically he took the spirit of the times and attributed it to himself, with the helping hands of the cern pr department. Now such success stories can be used for recruitment purposes.

Long PR story short: RPC was prevalent, that is how you control(led) your stuff remotely and they put the gopher link address ptr in the reserved field of the text font properties (where things like bold and italics properties are stored). Would the "web" have just ran on NeXT, it would be long extinct, let alone take off. Clicking on text is how you used Oberon or even Genera Document Examiner (perhaps even over the network).

On linking and hypertext: all post-war era stuff is spin. The real stuff comes from Belgium:

For ADD-ers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwRN5m64I7Y

The story: http://www.archive.org/details/paulotlet

hhttp://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/forgotten_forefather_paul...

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

Potential missing staff in some areas is a separate issue, and educational programmes are not designed to make up for it. On-the-job learning and training are not separated but dynamically linked together, benefiting to both parties. In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting.

http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-stud...

Resolution of the Staff Council

- the Management does not propose to align the level of basic CERN salaries with those chosen as the basis for comparison;

- in the new career system a large fraction of the staff will have their advancement prospects, and consequently the level of their pension, reduced with respect to the current MARS system;

- the overall reduction of the advancement budget will have a negative impact on the contributions to the CERN Health Insurance System (CHIS);

http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2015/46/Staff%20Asso...

The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists.

Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career at CERN.

This lack of an element of social responsibility in the contract policy is unacceptable. Rather than serve as a cushion of laziness for supervisors, who often have only a limited and utilitarian view when defining the opening of an IC post, the contract policy must ensure the inclusion of an element of social justice, which is cruelly absent today.

http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-...

Pensions which will be applicable to new recruits as of 1 January 2012; the Management and CERN Council adopted without any concertation and decided in June 2011 to adopt very unfavourable mesures for new recruits.

http://www.gac-epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin...

precarity at CERN, aka cheap disposable temp labour w/o healthcare: http://www.tdg.ch/geneve/actu-genevoise/suisse-prete-aider-e...

Given that cheap and disposable trainees — PhD students and postdocs — fuel the entire scientific research enterprise, it is not surprising that few inside the system seem interested in change. A system complicit in this sort of exploitation is at best indifferent and at worst cruel.