The Inventor of the World Wide Web Is Selling Its Original Source Code as an NFT at Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s London announced today that it will be auctioning off an NFT of the original source code for the World Wide Web, which, according to the house is the “first digital-born artifact to come to auction.”
Offered by British computer scientist and father of the World Wide Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee, the original time-stamped files containing the source code will be sold along with a more than 30-minute animated visualization, a letter Berners-Lee wrote about the process of creating the code, and a digital poster of the work featuring a graphic of Berners-Lee’s signature. The source code is approximately 9,555 lines and is written in languages Berners-Lee invented: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers).
“NFTs, be they artworks or a digital artifact like this, are the latest playful creations in this realm, and the most appropriate means of ownership that exists,” Berners-Lee said in a statement. “They are the ideal way to package the origins behind the web.”
