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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.
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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.
Tim Berners-Lee? Never heard of him. Everyone knows that Algore invented the Internet.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
......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.
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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.
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
After all, we're in the terrible 2.0's right now.
Someone change the diaper, there's twitter all over the place.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
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?)
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.
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