CERN history
The convention establishing CERN was signed on 29 September 1954 by 12 countries in Western Europe. The acronym CERN originally stood, in French, for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established by 11 European governments in 1952. The acronym was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1954. According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, when the name was changed, the acronym could have become the awkward OERN, and Heisenberg said "But the acronym can still be CERN even if the name is [not]".
Soon after its establishment, the work at the laboratory went beyond the study of the atomic nucleus, into higher-energy physics, an activity which is mainly concerned with the study of interactions between particles. Therefore the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European laboratory for particle physics (Laboratoire européen pour la physique des particules) which better describes the current research being performed at CERN.
Several important achievements in particle physics have been made during experiments at CERN. These include, but are not limited to, the following.
The 1984 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer for the developments that led to the discoveries of the W and Z bosons.
The 1992 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to CERN staff researcher Georges Charpak "for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber."
This NeXTcube used by British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server.
The World Wide Web began as a CERN project called ENQUIRE, initiated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1989. Berners-Lee and Cailliau were jointly honored by the ACM in 1995 for their contributions to the development of the World Wide Web.
Based on the concept of hypertext, the project was aimed at facilitating sharing information among researchers. The first website went on-line in 1991. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone. A copy of the original first webpage, created by Berners-Lee, is still published on the World Wide Web Consortium website as a historical document.
This Cisco Systems router at CERN was probably one of the first IP routers deployed in Europe.
Prior to the Web's development, CERN had been a pioneer in the introduction of Internet technology, beginning in the early 1980s. A short history of this period can be found here.
More recently, CERN has become a centre for the development of Grid computing, hosting among others the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) and LHC Computing Grid projects. It also hosts the CERN Internet Exchange Point (CIXP), one of the two main Internet Exchange Points in Switzerland. CERN's computer network is connected to JANET (formerly UKERNA), the research and education network, JANET aids CERN to disperse large data over a network grid for closer analysis.
This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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