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."

Comments

Some kind of mistake?

[dolo666]

This must be some kind of mistake? Al Gore invented the web, because it says so right here: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet" - Al Gore

Re:Some kind of mistake?

[Mwongozi]

Your quote is out of context

Re:Some kind of mistake?

[Himring]

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet" - Al Gore

Al Gore did not creat the Internet. He did, however, sleep at a holiday inn express....

Re:Some kind of mistake?

[pavogel_2000]

I'm one of those people who prefers to give Al Gore the benefit of the doubt. As a member of congress Gore was one of those who voted FOR the continued funding of a variety of initiatives that helped fund the research and development of technologies that make up a fairly significant % of what the layman calls "the internet" today. Further, I don't think anyone can ignore the fact that Al's popularization and use of the term "Information Superhighway" is a *significant part* of what took the web from the province of those of us working in science and technology into the mainstream. Consider: In 1992 (the campaign year the Info Superhighway term was used) to send mail to a friend at *cough* MicroSoft I had to supply!a!fully!qualified!path!to!microsoft!friend (or whatever the syntax was). MS did *not* have a web site. Few people even in the computer industry knew what Mosaic was (I was one of the first in my company of 1200 to download it after someone at OSF showed it to me). Gopher and FTP were the primary means of finding and retrieving resources on the internet. By 1994 we were beginning to count the # of TV commercials that included a pointer to a web site. By 1996 "the web" was a household term. I don't think things would have moved that fast without Al Gore's bringing it to the mainstream, leading to articles in Time, Newsweek, etc. Now -- the real debate -- was it a "good" thing for the web to hit the mainstream like that? Without that accelleration we may not have had the bubble and things could have grown at a more natural pace. Spam might not be as attractive as a vehicle for advertisement and therefore would be less of a problem (there certainly was VERY LITTLE spam between 1985 (the first year I used the net) and 1997 (the first time I saw significant junk in my public mail accounts). Was Al stupid in the way he phrased himself? Yes. Was his intent to claim he "invented" the internet? I don't think so. Was his intent to say he "popularized" the internet? Possibly. Peter+

Re:Some kind of mistake?

[bombadillo]

The Internet Society also mentions Al Gore in their history timeline. You have to give credit to Al Gore for taking the initiative from a political stand point. The creation of the Internet was a huge project that needed the cooperation of Universities, Businesses and Government. Projects of that scale always need a Politician to champion the cause to get funding and grants. Did Al Gore use an unfortunate choice of words? Yes.

question

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Tim Berners-Lee have his own website?

Re:question

[NekoXP]

www.w3.org isn't good enough for you?

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

Re:question

[Mwongozi]

Does Tim Berners-Lee have his own website?

Yes he does

The missing step

[Mwongozi]

He won a million euros out of this.

1. Invent HTML
2. Wait 13 years
3. Profit!

almost as rich as a dot.commer

[peter303]

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.

Fantastic

[kedi]

...Linus Torvalds next ?

whatever jokes you guys make out of it

[Anonymous Coward]

He did make what the "web" is today, the fact that you're reading this now is down to him, he did something which is far easier to do now (though still not!) in a time when this sort of concept couldn't be comprehended.

Praise the guy.

Re:whatever jokes you guys make out of it

[jaoswald]

Actually, the most interesting thing is that the original proposal by Berners-Lee offers no hint of commercial applications.

E-commerce, or even advertising-based commercial sites like Slashdot, don't get any mention at all.

Re:whatever jokes you guys make out of it

[Mateito]

> Slashdot, don't get any mention at all.

Strip the prize then. He obvisouly doesn't deserve it.

How could this man be so short sited not to have predicted the existance of Slashdot 13 years ago?

I remember when back when I connected to fidonet through the 120baud modem on my apple IIc that I'd finish every newsboard post with "I'm only posting this here because Slashdot doesn't exist yet".

Where's _my_ fucking knighthood?

Re:whatever jokes you guys make out of it

[HisMother]

> couldn't be comprehended

Uhh, yeah. Unless he had heard of Gopher/Archie/Veronica, at which point the WWW really becomes only an incremental improvement. Nobody creates something out of a vacuum. TBL was just, as is so often the case, in the right place at the right time.

Re:whatever jokes you guys make out of it

[MonTemplar]

No he didn't. Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft did.

Mosaic made the web browser.
Netscape mucked up the HTML specification.
Microsoft made the security holes.

Yep, they all played their part in making the World Wide Web what it is today. :-)

-MT.

jj

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Tim Berners-Lee have his own website?

No. He doesn't know HTML ;-)

IRC

[Cyuonut]

IMHO, they should have given the prize to Jarkko Oikarinen for creating IRC and totally screwing up my University studies.

Re:IRC

[Himring]

they should have given the prize to Jarkko Oikarinen for creating IRC and totally screwing up my University studies.

Or sid miers for civilization. That game put me in the hospital....

NeXTcube

[mirko]

The article about his knighthood includes a photo of the computer he used to develop his technique.
It's quite nice to know that like HTML, NeXTstep is still present as OSX.

Re:NeXTcube

[minus_273]

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

Re:NeXTcube

[WillAdams]

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.

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 :( 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

- 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 ;) --- check my rants at http://groups.google.com in comp.sys.next.advocacy to see if I forgot anything...)

BT?

[T-Kir]

And don't forget, British Telecom apparently 'invented' hyperlinking way before Sir Tim did... mind BT is a [sarcasm]much loved[/sarcasm] company here in blighty.

I'm in the process of filing an official complaint for them fecking up my broadband connection for three weeks (even though their "complaints" department might actually be a bin), since they're obviously such "innovators" of technology it takes another company to be able to provide my broadband services... anyway, rant over & just my 0.02

Re:BT?

[somethinghollow]

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.

Snopes ain't God, buddy ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

Your quote is out of context

This is one reason Snopes sometimes bugs me. It is not an "urban legend" that Gore made a sweeping claim, clearly intended to be interpreted as it was, but carefully crafted to be deniable.

Gore's devotees, however, were clearly quite discomfited by his claim ...

This Snopes article is basically an opinion piece, trying to pass as a skeptical debunking piece.

silly

[minus_273]

i think it is silly to claim that one person is the father of the web. Yet, the BBC loves to claim that it was Lee. With the number of different technologies that comprise the Internet today it is ignorant to say it has an inventor. Why HTML? and not Gopher? why not the creators of TCP/IP? why not routers? How about the first people to set up the network (who the US media claim invented the web).

Re:silly

[blane.bramble]

Because HTML and HTTP defined the World Wide Web. Note: the www is *not* the internet. Gopher is not the WWW. TCP/IP is not the WWW. Routers are not the WWW. The first people to set up the network helped invent the internet. Not the WWW.

Re:silly

[sir_cello]

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)

Finnish inferiority complex

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Finn I can't but wonder what the hell is the point in an award like this?

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.

I can see only one purpose for it: someone high up in the government/academia has a pretty bad case of inferiority complex and comes up with the idea of the prize to alleviate it. "Let's get more attention to us Finns by giving out money. Oh yeah, a great idea. The Swedes are already doing it with the Nobel prize, so let's start our own knock-off award, complete with all the pomp-and-ceremony."

Re:Finnish inferiority complex

[azaris]

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.

Re:Finnish inferiority complex

[Jansku]

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!

We need a new mod category

[gosand]

He did make what the "web" is today, the fact that you're reading this now is down to him, he did something which is far easier to do now (though still not!) in a time when this sort of concept couldn't be comprehended.

I think we need a new mod category: Incomprehensible.

Nonsense

[Fished]

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.

You don't have to be British...

[blorg]

...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).

TBL points out that he didn't invent the internet

[blorg]

...but rather the WWW, right here. It's in his 'Kid's Questions' section - you might want to check it out.

Politicians and the Internet

[AtariAmarok]

George W Bush: "The Internet? What's that?"

Albert W Gore: "I created it"

John F Kerry: "I voted for it, and I voted against it"

Pat Buchanan: "If we stop illegal immigration, the spam and pop-up problem will be taken care of".