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.'"
......but we would not have flattened the world. I can tell you this, I remember when Reagan was shot. I remember teacher strikes in the 70's. I remember Kent State. I remember the first time I every saw Moasaic.Too old for GenX, tool old for babyboomer. I can tell you this: I never thought the wall would fall and I never thought I'd read Russian websites/bloggs like they were around the corner or in the next town. The Internet, more specifically the WWW *HAS* flattened the world in that respect. Imagine what "Reporters Without Borders" would be without it? It is hard now for people to imagine the world without it.
Mr Lee should continue to receive high recognition for what he and CERN have given us.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
The web is a tool; a tool to get false or misleading information more quickly, and to order crap to satisfy compulsive purchasing drives more easily.
It hasn't "flattened" the world - the rich are still getting richer, the poor still live in squalor; good students still use traditional journals to research, mediocre students crib off their peers (whether that's by copying chunks from the guy across the dorm or the undergrad who wrote a Wikipedia entry, the result is the same); wars are still being waged; freedoms are being withdrawn with full force from citizens in Western nations; heavy industry and big pharma is more "closed source" than ever, with everything privatised under the Sun, and the Internet has done little to open up either field.
TBL's right in one thing: the web is still in its infancy. I've been on the 'net since 1994, aged 13, but I still get almost all worthwhile information from print resources or electronic versions of print resources (few of which are published in HTML). Since the art of writing good documentation has been replaced by the assumption of availability of peer support, problems that could be solved by use of the revolutionary "index" now take hours while I wait for a good Usenet / forum response, so in many ways my progress has become slower.
The Web is a good time waster, though. Like TV, only I get to be part of the programme-making.
Where was the printing press 15 years after its invention?
Where was the telephone fifteen years after its invention? (Hint: not in many homes)
Where was the television fifteen years after its invention? It was Commercially available since the late 1930s but when I was a kid in the 1950s there were only three stations in the St Louis metro area, one of the US's larger cities.
The internet is barely out of the womb,
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Q: Do you wish you'd started the Web as a business?
A: If I'd started "Web Inc." it would have been just another proprietary system. You wouldn't have had this universality. For something like the Web to exist, it has to be based on public, nonproprietary standards.
— Tim Berners-Lee, Wired, 1997
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
E-mail, a mature technology, is now 90% spam. The Web isn't quite there yet. Another five years, and we'll be there.
(Thought for today: does the infrastructure required to deliver e-mail spam and Internet ads use more energy than the paper-based direct mail industry?)
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. He may not have said he invented it, but his words ARE, "I took the initiative creating the internet."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpxtKcLSFWw
So from a manager's point of view, sure, he created it. But in actuality all he did was take advice from his technology aids, sign papers, and talk a lot about it. It sounds like he's taking credit for coming up with the concept of what the internet is, and then constructing hardware, software, and protocols that are the internet. None of which is true. He merely realized that there was an existing network that could and presumably should be available to the world.
His words took more credit than he deserved. I just wish people would use the correct words when making fun of him. He didn't claim to invent anything. He claimed to create it. All he did was rename something and make it public.
You don't see people making fun of Bill Clinton for claiming to have created GPS. That's because he didn't make that claim. He just took an existing system, renamed it, and made it public. Mr Gore also had hands in GPS, improving its civilian accuracy. But he wasn't dumb enough to claim having created it.
Just poor word choice. Everyone knows he didn't create the internet. We just like making fun of the silly old man (:
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Untrue and completely wrong. The Mosaic browser was based on the libwww software developed at CERN. They did not credit the work, but all the major intellectual components of the Web came from CERN: The URI, HTTP, HTML, 404 not found.
The NCSA group did make a practice of failing to credit Tim's work. In particular the original releases of Mosaic failled to mention the use of CERN code or that it was built on CERN ideas. That is generally regarded as plagiarism. The original Mosaic instructions did not include the string 'World Wide Web' or 'CERN'
Tim's prior claim is well established, as is the fact that there were Web browsers developed before Tim met the NCSA people.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/