Apparently you can put a price on history.
Tim Berners-Lee, a member of the Internet Hall of Fame’s inaugural class, recently auctioned off a copy of the original source code for the World Wide Web as a non-fungible token. After adding in auction fees, the package sold for $5.4 million, with the proceeds going to organizations selected by Berners-Lee and his wife.
The anonymous buyer will be able to download or view the 9,555 lines of code originally written in the early 1990s. The purchase also comes with a 30-minute video showing the code being written, a digital poster, a graphic of Berners-Lee’s autograph and a letter from Berners-Lee about the process involved with creating the code.
In a statement to Bloomberg, Berners-Lee said the auction preparation work sent him on a trip down memory lane.
“The process of bringing this NFT to auction has offered me the opportunity to look back in time at the moment I first sat down to write this code 30 years ago and reflect on how far the web has come since then,” he said.
