Slashdot Mirror
Berners-Lee Claims Web "Still In Infancy"
eldavojohn writes "The man credited with inventing the Web at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, has made a statement on the 15th anniversary of the Web's initial code release that the Web is still in its infancy. He also made a pretty insightful comment about CERN's releasing of the code for the Web into public domain: 'If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now. We would have had some sort of market share alongside services like AOL and Compuserve, but we would not have flattened the world.'"
I started using the Web in 1992 and it was demonstrated in public then. And in any case the Internet is more like 30 years.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
First, he didn't invent the Internet (capital 'i' please), he is credited with inventing the World Wide Web. Repeat after me: The World Wide Web is NOT the Internet.
Also, I think the web has clearly passed the infant stage and is deeply entrenched in the awkward adolescent phase: It has been doing a lot of experimenting lately with new looks and new technologies. Sure, it thinks it looks really cool and edgy with all of its new Web 2.0 gear (probably bought it from Hot Topic) and it probably feels real good smoking all that XML, but in the end it just ends up being slower, less reliable, and just looks foolish most of the time.
March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee handed his boss a short document entitled Information Management: a Proposal, is one.
Christmas of the following year, when the Web was up and running on two computers, is another.
But perhaps the most important Web anniversary of all is 30 April 1993.
That's the day that Cern put the web in the public domain, thereby ensuring that the world would have a single system for accessing the Internet, instead of a Microsoft Web, a Macintosh Web and who knows, perhaps even an Amstrad Web.
Today, it is hard to imagine a world without the web, yet well into the 1990s, internet access was the reserve of the privileged few, mainly academics.
Although the internet had been around since the 1970s, accessing documents on remote computers required the mastery of complex protocols. Scientists had been doing that for years, and at Cern, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, they were particularly adept. So, it's the 15th anniversary today of when CERN handed over the code to the public domain (thank god they did!).
My work here is dung.
Nation Information Infrastructure (information superhway) bill passed in Dec 1991. It bought some optical fiber backbones, encouraged adoption of standards. In the 1980s the "net" was rag-tag collection of suibnets- arpatnet, milnet, NSFnet, BITnet, dialup bboards- etc.
Everyone knows that Algore invented the Internet.
I am so sick and tired of this crap. It is nothing less than a republican smear campaign against Al Gore that has been parroted by the puppet media and it has gone on too f*&^king long.
Al Gore never said he "invented" the internet, but he was instrumental in taking Darpa net public as the internet through legislation and the ability to articulate the vision.
So, without Al Gore, Tim Berners-Lee would not have had the foundation on which to build the web.
Al Gore did not "invent" the internet, but it was his persuasion and legislative skills that made it happen. Give the guy a break, he has done some great things and don't let the bogus lies continue to smear him. Take responsibility for your opinions.