ENQUIRE was the early CERN hypertext project Tim Berners-Lee created in 1980.
Berners-Lee developed ENQUIRE during a six-month period at CERN beginning in June 1980. He designed it as a personal information-management tool for organizing the people, projects, documents, and systems surrounding the laboratory’s many research collaborations. The name was inspired by the old book title Enquire Within Upon Everything.
ENQUIRE used “cards” connected by links with defined relationships, such as “made,” “includes,” or “describes.” In some respects it resembled a closed, relationship-rich wiki more than a modern website. It was implemented in Pascal on a Norsk Data NORD-10 computer and initially used plain-text terminal displays.
ENQUIRE was not the World Wide Web, and it did not become a public global system. Berners-Lee later recognized that CERN needed a more open design in which anyone could create pages and link to external information independently. That insight helped lead to the Web, which he proposed in 1989 and implemented in 1990.