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Sir Tim Berners-Lee Lauded For Web Efforts
crem_d_genes writes "The first Millenium Technology Prize to be given by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation has been awarded to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the 'Father of the Web', for his work in creating the hypertext program that would come to change the way in which scientists, and later the general public would access data over the internet. The rest is history."
www.w3.org isn't good enough for you?
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
MIT prof Berners-Lee could have cashed in long ago as a web startup and gotten rich, but decided to develop his his dream without commercial taint. This $1.2 million prize, along with a few others he has won, helps compensate this sacrifice.
Yes he does
Your quote is out of context
Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet.
Status: False.
Origins: No,
Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The derisive "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs are misleading distortions of something he said (taken out of context) during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clearly, although Gore's phrasing was clumsy (and self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible for helping to create I also invented the microphone the environment (in an economic and legislative sense) that fostered the development of the Internet. Al Gore might not know nearly as much about the Internet and other technologies as his image would have us believe, and he certainly has been guilty of stretching (if not outright breaking) the truth before, but to believe that Gore seriously thought he could take credit for the "invention" of the Internet -- in the sense offered by the media -- is just silly. (To those who say the words "create" and "invent" mean the same thing: If they mean the same thing, then why have the media overwhelmingly and consistently cited Gore as having claimed he "invented" the Internet when he never used that word? The answer is that the words don't mean the same thing, but by substituting one word for the other, commentators can make Gore's claim sound [more] ridiculous.)
However, validating even the lesser claim Gore intended to make is problematic. Any statement about the "creation" or "beginning" of the Internet is difficult to evaluate, because the Internet is not a homogenous entity (it's a collection of computers, networks, protocols, standards, and application programs), nor did it all spring into being at once (the components that comprise the Internet were developed in various places at different times and are continuously being modified, improved, and expanded). Despite a spirited defense of Gore's claim by Vint Cerf (often referred to as the "father of the Internet") in which he stated "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it," many of the components of today's Internet came into being well before Gore's first term in Congress began in 1977, and it's hard to find any specific action of Gore's (such as his sponsoring a Congressional bill or championing a particular piece of legislation) that one could claim helped bring the Internet into being, much less validate Gore's statement of having taken the "initiative in creating the Internet."
It's true that Gore was popularizing the term "information superhighway" in the early 1990s (when few people outside academia or the computer/defense industries had heard of the Internet) and has introduced a few bills dealing with education and the Internet, but even though Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President Gore may always have been interested in and well-informed about information technology issues, that's a far cry from having taken an active, vital leadership role in bringing about those technologies. Even if Al Gore had never entered the political arena, we'd probably still be reading web pages via the Internet today.
Last updated: 27 September 2000
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.htm
And Vannevar Bush really did invent hyperlinking way before British Telecom with the writing / publication of "As We May Think" circa 1945.
I think Berners-Lee would be the daddy of the web. Bush would be the grand daddy.
Interesting, seems Timmy likes his Windows enviroment, but doesn't like the office software:-
Email is safe unless it contains programs. (Data and documents are fine, programs are not). If you send me a program, I will not run it, as it could damage my system and could be a virus.
* Note: Documents for Microsoft word, Excel, and possibly other Office programs tend to execute programs (scripts) in what you would expect to be harmless documents. These can expose my machine to viruses, because these programs do not (it seems) prevent scripts from running within a document when it received by email. Please do not send me Microsoft Office documents.
* If you are sending text, please send it as plain text or HTML. If you use your favorite word process, slide tool, etc, and send it in that program's format, then you are forcing me install proprietary software on whatever machine I read them on. .
* If your email is sent from Microsoft Outlook, and contains an attachment, I will be more likely to discard it as I understand that a famous series of viruses in 2001 resulted from Outlook's tendency to execute scripts in email, and used up a huge amount of my and my colleague's time.
Sounds like a classic 'Switch' campaign to me.
OSX *is* NextSTEP for all intents and purposes. It is not even a total rewrite of NextSTEP - it is just an evolution of NeXT with new eye-candy and a MacOS 9 compatibility layer bundled. Go read some 'man' pages - half of the weird little commands in OSX (such as 'open') were first created in NeXT.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
...to receive a knighthood, only to use the title 'Sir'. Gates is being knighted (this was covered so widely I suspect you may be a troll) along with many other Americans including Rudy Giuliani, Steven Spielberg, Bob Hope, Billy Graham, George Mitchell, Norman Schwarzkopf and George Bush senior. Note the inclusion of politicians and that the 1810 consitutional amendment banning American citizens from accepting foreign honours was never ratified (ref: quoted BBC article above).
...but rather the WWW, right here. It's in his 'Kid's Questions' section - you might want to check it out.
dude OSX uses an Openstep implematation as its API. have you written any code on OSX? All the objects derive from NSobject and they all have the prefix NS. NS obviously standing for NextStep. Oh yeah and we still use Objective-C. The Next iterfacebuilder that Lee liked so much? Yes it is called interface builder and saves files as .Nib (next step interface builder). If you look at early versions of OSX like Raphsody you see it is nearly identical to Next.
Finally, lots of code written for OSX builds on Gnustep and Openstep. For example GNUmail
So, yes it is correct to say that OSX is the modern version of NextStep just like WinXP is the modern Windows
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I mean come on. Every two years we ship one million euros of tax-payers money abroad and get what in return? It's just stupid.
Who says it's tax-payer money? From their website:
The Finnish Technology Award Foundation is an independent fund established in 2002 by eight Finnish organisations that support technological development and innovation.
Founding Organizations
The Confederation of Finnish Industry and Employers - TT
The Finnish Academies of Technology - FACTE
The Finnish Academy of Technology - TTA
The Finnish Assosiation of Graduated Engineers - TEK
The Foundation of Technology - TES
Foundation of Finnish Inventions
The Swedish Academy of Engineering in Finland - STV
Walter Ahlström Foundation
The usual idea behind foundations is that you have a body that gathers money from donations from corporations are individuals - then uses the interest and profits from investments to fund charitable causes. I don't really see why they would be directly giving away "tax-payer money" as such.
NeXTstep was not merely an austere aesthetic experience, w/ minimal distractions and a flexible, customizable UI which allowed one to reduce screen clutter to just a single tile (the NeXT logo), and a pixel or two (dragged off main menu and / or the cursor), but synergistic whole the likes of which sadly are not likely to be seen again.
:( having them on the left means a window is more useful when partially dragged off-screen and results in less-frequent need to resize a window
;) --- check my rants at http://groups.google.com in comp.sys.next.advocacy to see if I forgot anything...)
Panther helps the aesthetics somewhat, but NeXT users still miss / are irritated by (well, I know I am):
- monolithic main menu bar w/ wasted blank space between the menus and the (optional) information / settings menus for Airport &c.
- verbose Mac-style shortcut descriptions w/ arcane symbols instead of concise NeXT-style shortcuts (in NeXTstep, Save is indicated by ``s'' and Save as by ``S'', no Command symbol (it's assumed---Control only as a modifier is reserved for personal shortcuts / Unix-use), Shift by case)
- Print, Hide, Services and Quit are no longer top-level menus where they made more sense and were quicker to get at.
- scroll bars on wrong side (this can't be fixed by theming 'cause Carbon apps are responsible for deciding where scroll bars are placed
- no Webster.app, Digital Librarian / Shakespeare or Oxford's Book of Quotations --- in NeXTstep this meant one was guaranteed to have Command = _not_ used in an app so it'd be available for looking things up in Websters. Sure you can d/l OmniGroups dict.org client &c., but it's not the same (esp. if you're on dial-up)
- Pantone colour library --- used to be this was licensed w/ the system, now each graphic app which needs it has to pay a license, and one _doesn't_ get them in one's office apps (major negative for adhering to corporate identity programs where such is specced) until such time as Office apps are written in Cocoa or support the nsColor API/object/whatever.
- vertical menu
- pop-up main menu --- this is wonderfully fast / efficient / elegant. For me, ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuoso is pretty much a gesture, right-click, down a bit, then straight over and release
- repositionable sub-menus --- no need for inscrutable button bars, and one can make a given command easy to get to as needed (when doing lots of envelopes I tear of the poste.app Services menu, put it in the bottom left corner, then an envelope is merely a selection, mouse move to bottom left, click, shift right to the print menu (also aligned on the bottom edge for this) click away. (takes longer to say / type than to do)
William
(who really should save all that and put it on a web page, but this time cribbed from my post to MacSlash
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
If you want precision:
He's not the father of hypertext, that largely goes to Ted Nelson.
He's not the father of the internet, that largely goes to the early ARPANET pioneers and no one name in particular.
He's not the father of open source software, that largely goes to Richard Stallman and GNU.
He is the father of the Web though, which is built upon the ideas of hypertext, but uses the TCP/IP protocol suite on the internet, and a lot of the software that drives the internet is possible because of open source _and_ open standards, and as much as possible WWW embodies the idea (alongside the IETF) of openness and accessibility.
In each of these cases you can find examples of prior technology (e.g. you mention Gopher, but in fact WAIS was closer to WWW than anything else - and WAIS came out of Thinking Machines Corp. of who some of the people are now with the web archive), and related pioneers (e.g. Linux - rather than Linus - have helped drive acceptance of open source; or Andersaan and Netscape who helped turn the WWW into a practical reality with browser technology). However, the names mentioned are the key figureheads.
Be careful to distinguish the layers:
- the internet (i.e. the transport)
- the web (i.e. the content)
- open source (i.e. the social philosophy)
Hei, come on guys! As a fellow finn I can say IT'S YOU that have the inferiority complex - not the people who put up the award. So obvious. What the heck does it matter anyway, so to speak, if we have this award? You complain, you have the complex!