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Tim Berners-Lee is known as the inventor of the internet
Photo: SIMON DAWSON / REUTERS
The US auction house Sotheby's wants to auction the source code for the Internet.
The first digital artifact ever to be auctioned by Sotheby's are the original files by Sir Tim Berners-Lee from 1989 with the appropriate time stamp and signature, as Sotheby's announced on Tuesday.
The auction will take place June 23-30 and will start with a minimum bid of $ 1000.
On March 12, 1989, Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for an information management system from which the World Wide Web emerged.
At that time he was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.
Today he is considered to be the inventor of the Internet.
Sotheby's is auctioning the source code as a so-called NFT (non-fungible token).
This is a kind of digital certificate of authenticity: there can be any number of identical copies of the item, but only this one can be considered the original.
NFT is currently experiencing a boom: a linked copy of a collage by digital artist Beeple was recently auctioned for a good $ 69.3 million.
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