CERN celebrates 30 years since releasing the web to the public domain

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Sunday celebrated the 30th anniversary of releasing the World Wide Web into the public domain. As the World Wide Web Consortium's brief history of the web explains, in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee - then a fellow at CERN - proposed that the organization adopt "a global hypertext …

[Dr Paul Taylor]

Mirage of democracy

A colleague first told me about "xmosaic" on 24 May 1993.

When I first saw the WWW I thought it would be a democratic revolution. People could post their materials in a way that cut across Manglement.

What a dystopia we have now!

I hated HTML - it's so verbose! I thought that, since Berners-Lee was surrounded by people writing Physics in LaTeX, he should have based the language on that.

What a horrendous mess we have now!

[b0llchit]

Re: Mirage of democracy

Yes, html may be verbose and a mess in several directions. However, condemning a large population to the quirks of LaTeX would be an even larger masochistic move bordering to cruel and unusual punishment without being convicted of any crime. ^{_{And, yes, I do use LaTeX for some documents.}}

[GruntyMcPugh]

Re: Mirage of democracy

I recall starting work at a University Physics dept in the early 90s and my boss getting me to update some documentation that was in LaTeX, and thinking it was a bit convoluted. More so that 'reveal codes' in WordPerfect : -)

[Korev]

Re: Mirage of democracy

There's also This paper: "On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users."

[GruntyMcPugh]

Re: Mirage of democracy

Interesting. I just knocked out a few quick, simple formulae in Word, and it seemed fairly straight forward. I then considered a Sum with limits,... and er, well, I wouldn't remember how to do that in LaTeX either : -)

[that one in the corner]

Re: Mirage of democracy

Rather late to this article, but nevertheless:

> However, our study suggests that LaTeX should be used as a document preparation system only in cases in which a document is heavily loaded with mathematical equations.

Or any digital document which the scientific community want to still be able to read in 20, 30, 100 years time.

Hypothesis: scientists who use LaTeX (or even plain TeX!) are more likely to write the next Principia, still worth reading oodles of years later.

[Tom 7]

Re: Mirage of democracy

You're blaming HTML for humans?

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Mirage of democracy

The genesis was obviously SGML as this was supposed to be a non-visual language with little or no ideas of presentation. We then went through around twenty years of it being abused for presentation. Nowadays most HTML is pretty legible.

[Graham Cobb]

Re: Mirage of democracy

Nowadays most HTML is pretty legible.

I beg to disagree. While it is perfectly possible to write legible HTML and create useful, clean and functional websites, no "web designer" ever does. They would be thrown out of their union!

Between the horrible hack that is CSS, and client-side javascript frameworks, it is impossible to read almost all HTML documents on the public web without presentation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mirage of democracy

It's also impossible to see anything with JavaScript turned off.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Mirage of democracy

I've just checked the source of this page, and apart from it being a largely semantic-free soup of divs, the source is definitely more legible than say a year ago and would definitely work without JS though the lack of semantic tags would hamper a good rendering.

CSS has also improved though there were some deliberate decisions that I find make it more confusing that it should be. I didn't mention Javascript, but that too has improved and some people have even got the message that they need less of it than they thought they did. I hate "Single Page Apps" and it seems I'm not the only one as they're less popular than they were say five years ago.

[jake]

The only reason that WWW ...

... beat out Gopher was because the University of Minnesota decided on more restrictive licensing than the toy out of CERN.

And we're still suffering for it.

[Dr Paul Taylor]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

No. Gopher was barely more than a way of indexing documents served by FTP.

HTML turned the paradigm around: the document itself became primary, along with a way of indexing other documents.

Also, being able to "click" on things opened it up to The Great Unwashed.

At first I was skeptical of "hyper-text". Around the time of Noah (1970s, maybe), in the London Science Museum, I played with a demo of hyper-text intended for teaching. It was a history of the calendar. It was full of exercises - which you were forced to do in order to proceed. So I only had time to see the first chapter.

Nowadays, if some company wants you to do an "online survey", it's just like that. Typically it starts with the personal data, in case you get bored later. So I refuse to do them.

[abend0c4]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

I was very peripherally involved in TBL's attempts to get interest/investment in the early days. There were a few reasons there wasn't exactly a stampede: firstly, a lot of people were still using text-based terminals so pre-built menus designed for their limited capabilities (such as gopher) were more efficiently navigated; there was much more emphasis on "informational professionals" in the organisation of information resources (people collating their own pet resources was frowned upon) and here most of the effort was around Z39.50; most of the resources initially available to reference would in any case have been offline; in the absence of full-text searching, none of the approaches were significantly more useful than a card index.

In hindsight, it was the removal of the "information professional" bottleneck that allowed the rapid growth of web-based documents to the point at which they became worth indexing and after that it was all largely down to being the incumbent technology. Of course, it also led to the proliferation of disinformation, but back in my young days most of the technical section of the local library was at least 30 years out of date, which was as much - if not more - of a drawback.

[Graham Cobb]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

I'm not sure that it wasn't the other way around: the creation of full-text searching led to the removal of the "information professional" role.

I remember, in the early days of the web, playing with a side-project of indexing all the internal discussion sites (they were called "Notes" sites) at DEC - initially with a gopher interface. I was fairly quickly told to stop wasting my time by the guys on the West Coast who were busy developing what became AltaVista. I would say that at that time we had started to see the decline of project librarians but there were still a lot of professional technical writers. The ideas of engineers writing web pages, or tools to develop reference manuals from comments in the code, were not yet mainstream.

[jake]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

"Gopher was barely more than a way of indexing documents served by FTP."

It is/was far, far more than that. Don't be disingenuous, it doesn't behoove you.

[Dan 55]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

Not very much more, there's one short RFC which describes Gopher and another shorter one which describes Gopher URIs used in web browsers.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

I liked Gopher and I liked the WWW. For many things, the web did end up reinventing Gopher because Gopher was excellent at revealing structured information like directories. HTML was much more free form, but that's why hypertext was invented, because it's how many people do things naturally.

[jake]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

I was using Gopher on a Sun Workstation along side the early WWW software (early '90s) ... Gopher was far easier to use, client-side and server-side, and had a huge[0] head start. I honestly think that if the University of Minnesota had gone with the GPL, instead of a fee-based license, for the server right from the git-go, Gopher would have the place that the Web has today ... Or be operating alongside it as a peer, at least.

My 107 years young Great Aunt is not quite done publishing her life story in Gopher. When I started teaching her, it seemed like the easiest option for what she was trying to do. That was about 30 years ago, when Auntie was a sprightly 77ish. I run the server. I'd have moved her over to the Web years ago, but she's resistant to change and quite happy with gopher. I almost hope she never finishes it ... I kind of suspect that the project is one of the things that keeps the old girl going.

[0] "Huge" in the world of software development in the late 80s and early 90s time was on the order of weeks or months, not years.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

The GPL would have been a terrible licence for either Gopher or CERN's stuff: public domain and keep the lawyers out of things.

[that one in the corner]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

Just want to remind everyone that hypertext goes back to 1960, at which time not many people had much experience with hierarchical file systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines

[Korev]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

... beat out Gopher was because the University of Minnesota decided on more restrictive licensing than the toy out of CERN.

Or that Philip Schofield wouldn't let him out of the Broom Cupboard[0]

[0] May not mean much if you're not from the UK[1]

[1] And are of a certain age...

[jake]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

"[1] And are of a certain age..."

I'm older than Schofield ... does that count?

Is your Broom Closet under the stairs?[0] Or is that the glory hole?[1]

[0] Yes, I know about the BBC kiddy show. Never watched it, I'm in the wrong demographic. Was when I was a kiddy, too.

[1] Just to precipitate an argument. Beer?

[Phones Sheridan]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

They should have followed up Gopher with a release 3 years later called Duck [2]

[2] are are of another certain age....

[anothercynic]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

Gopher? EWWWWWWWWW!

There was a great bunch of utilities that came from a company in South Africa called Ferret... Web Ferret, Email Ferret, etc etc... they also had a Gopher version and boy did it make life much much easier than the existing Gopher utilities.

Once Netscape blew Mosaic out of the water and the web took off (and the search engines got a lot better), those utilities went away...

[jake]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

"Gopher? EWWWWWWWWW!"

How to tell me that you never used Gopher without having to say "I never used Gopher"

"Once Netscape blew Mosaic out of the water"

Probably because the major developers of Mosaic at NCSA (Andreessen and a few others) moved to California and started Netscape Communications (originally "Mosaic Communications").

[doublelayer]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

How to tell me that you never used Gopher without having to say "I never used Gopher"

I really like how simply disagreeing with your opinion means they can't possibly have any experience, and that they're lying to boot. Can you tell me the secret to making my opinion the right one, disagreements with which are universally wrong without having to know any facts about the person who disagrees? So far, all the statement says is that they don't like Gopher, not any reason why or any allegations of what Gopher did or didn't do.

[jake]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

It's not simply disagreeing with an opinion. It is decades of past experience demonstrating that a one-word answer to a multi-level problem likely indicates a lack of familiarity on the part of the party uttering that one word.

[doublelayer]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

"It's not simply disagreeing with an opinion. It is decades of past experience demonstrating that a one-word answer to a multi-level problem likely indicates a lack of familiarity on the part of the party uttering that one word."

The post you replied to has more than one word, and was not entitled "A comprehensive review of the Gopher protocol's advantages and disadvantages". The post was not trying to encompass every detail of the protocol, whether it was good or not both objectively and in comparison, and how it was and is used. It was expressing an opinion, and the one word you chose to quote simply indicates that the opinion is negative.

Not only do you appear to have completely ignored that reality, but you assume that the person never used the system. Their negative opinion, with which you disagree, can't be because they came to different conclusions than you did, nor can it be because they were unfamiliar with something you used which improves the experience. No, you allege that they didn't use the system at all, and presumably just made up an opinion out of whole cloth. You dismissed an opinion based on no evidence at all, and in a way that doesn't make logical sense. I never used Gopher, and I have no opinion about it. I could try using the remnants that are still around and come to an opinion, but unless I do, my view on it is neutral. Their view is not, which is a lot more likely to have come from using it and not liking it than deciding to make up an opinion for no reason.

You've expressed negative views on systemd in other posts. Usually, you don't write an essay explaining each complaint you have about systemd's design or use, you simply say it's bad or you call it a "cancer". That's "a one-word answer to a multi-level problem". How would you react to someone who said "How to tell me you've never used systemd"? It would be incorrect and I'm sure you know that.

[IGotOut]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

It's Jake.

He doesn't do change unless it's to the detriment of the larger society.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

You could have just said "don't be a cnut"

[david 12]

it changed software development

In the 1970's, there was an expectation of the "end of programming" -- that all the (green-screen) applications needed by business would be completed, and all the world would need would be a small coterie of operations and maintainence programmers.

Then PC's were introduced, and we got to do everything all over again.

Then the Internet came, and we got to do everything all over again.

Then smartphones came, and we got to do everything all over again.

Then web services and the cloud came, and we got to do everything over again.

Nobody I knew was predicting this in 1975!

[Tom 7]

Re: it changed software development

Then the Internet came, and we got to do everything all over again.

Then smartphones came, and we got to do everything all over again even though we didnt have to.

Then web services and the cloud came, and we got to do everything over again because we didnt realise we'd done most of it already.

Nobody you knew was predicting this in 1975 - we'd have needed the web for that.

[heyrick]

Re: it changed software development

I'm still waiting for the tin foil clothing that I was promised as a child in the late '70s. All that really looks different is that once upon a time putting on headphones and staring at a gadget meant you were an antisocial bastard. Now it's just normal. For everything else, this is starting to look like the shit version of the '80s, only an alternate '80s where they got Prestel working and widely adopted.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: it changed software development

Back when |I was a kid, peoaple walking around talking to themselves were the local nutters[*]. Now everyone is at it (phone in pocket, in-ear wireless ear buds you can barely see)

* not PC nowadays, but I'm using it in it's historical context. Please don't cancel me!!!!!

[Nifty]

Re: it changed software development

Jasper Carrot => The Nutter on the Bus sketch. Yes, such comedy wouldn't be created today. Cromwell would be happy.

[DoctorPaul]

Re: it changed software development

The age-old question I ask myself when someone walks towards me apparently talking to themselves - Bluetooth or schizophrenia?

[jake]

Re: it changed software development

"In the 1970's, there was an expectation of the "end of programming" -- that all the (green-screen) applications needed by business would be completed, and all the world would need would be a small coterie of operations and maintainence programmers."

Only a few folks suggested this was possible, mostly management being hopeful that they could get rid of costly staff, and their sycophants and hangers-on.

"Then PC's were introduced, and we got to do everything all over again."

Not all over again. Rather, finding new ways of doing certain things. The old things carried on, and STILL carry on, to this day. I'll bet your bank runs code written in the 1950s.

"Then the Internet came, and we got to do everything all over again."

Again, no. Finding new ways to use computing tools as they became more sophisticated and networking became ubiquitous. The old ways stayed put, and were still used as needed.

"Then smartphones came, and we got to do everything all over again."

The biggest change here was dumbing down and shrinking computing so any old idiot could play angry birds on the bus to work. Note that Mattel sold Auto Race, a hand-held portable digital game, in 1976. (Motorola's DynaTAC came out in 1983, Nintendo's Gameboy in 1989.)

"Then web services and the cloud came, and we got to do everything over again."

To all intents and purposes, those had existed since the 1930s. See: "service bureau". Later, as computers and networking became faster and more powerful, the so-called "timeshare" grew popular.

"Nobody I knew was predicting this in 1975!"

It was all predicted long before the 1970s. Dick Tracy had his 2-way wrist radio in 1946 (2-way wrist TV by the early 1960s). By the mid-1950s, it had percolated from popular culture into upper management. Here's a link to a clip of an AP article, published in many mainstream newspapers on April 10th, 1953. Have you not read the science fiction from the Golden Age?

[Richard 12]

Re: it changed software development

Most of those works simply assumed computers would get larger and larger, reaching the size of a small moon.

I don't recall many (any?) pulps that placed the actual computer in someone's pocket. Just the "dumb terminal".

Oh cloud. Seems they were right anyway...

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: it changed software development

"In the 1970's, there was an expectation of the "end of programming" -- that all the (green-screen) applications needed by business would be completed, and all the world would need would be a small coterie of operations and maintainence programmers."

And less than 30 years later, the Millenium Bug hit and there were no programmers left to fix it, bringing on the downfall of human civilisation :-)

[Tom 7]

Re: it changed software development

We could have had the end of programming years ago. But now we have to reprogram everything in the new languages that solve the problem of not RTFMing other languages.

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that dislikes this inventor of the world wide web talk? I feel it takes away from all the people before that built the actual network it sits on. It would be like praising a piece of software based on the person who created the GUI. No one person can claim to be the "father" of the web. That's just my opinion on it.

[GioCiampa]

WWW != Internet ... that's a whole different invention

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet is the WWW. Who separates the two? How many times have you heard someone say I'm going to check the internet when they really mean the WWW? Beside "World Wide Web" is the technology behind HTTP. HTTP is just something that sits on top of it and translates text to pages after you use DNS. A GUI.

[jake]

"How many times have you heard someone say I'm going to check the internet when they really mean the WWW?"

All the fucking time. It's a daily demonstration of the ignorance of the great unwashed.

I often check Internet resources that are not on the WWW, and likely never will be ... but then I'm a computer user, not a shiny interface fondler.

[doublelayer]

"The internet is the WWW. Who separates the two?"

People who want to be specific and refer to them separately, although your next statement is a bad example of this.

"How many times have you heard someone say I'm going to check the internet when they really mean the WWW?"

Not a distinction that matters. What they mean when they say "check the internet" is that they'll connect to something that will tell them information. I say it, and often I do mean the web, but sometimes I mean that I'll use a different communication system such as connecting to a remote terminal, accessing a database, email, or an FTP server. All of those are on the internet, and insisting that people use a specific service name instead of the generic and well-understood term is useless.

"Beside "World Wide Web" is the technology behind HTTP. HTTP is just something that sits on top of it and translates text to pages after you use DNS. A GUI."

All of that is wrong. Starting from the end. HTTP is not a GUI. It's a protocol for transferring things. HTML isn't a GUI either; it's a language for specifying content that can be rendered graphically or not. The GUI is in a browser engine such as Gecko, WebKit, or Blink. The WWW is a collection of inventions including HTTP and HTML but not limited to those. In fact one of the most important parts might be the URI system that is used by HTTP resources but also many other systems, both ones that existed pre-HTTP and ones created later. DNS doesn't necessarily come into it, as that is an internet system that is often, but not universally used in HTTP or other WWW technologies. A URI that has an address instead of a domain is still a valid one. Systems that have their own naming systems independent of DNS and use HTTP on top are also valid ones.

[localzuk]

I feel you're missing out the fact that the web as it stands now is due to decades of development to make it more useful than it originally was.

Originally, you couldn't access email via the web. You couldn't chat via the web. You couldn't do a lot of things via the web. They each had their own services that sat upon the Internet. Email had its own clients using IMAP, or even local clients directly on the server you received email on. Chat was done via IRC, via dedicated clients. Transferring files was done using FTP servers via their own client.

It has taken decades for decent web alternatives to each of those things to appear. But, those web alternatives often still use the original tools behind the scenes. Gmail still sits atop an email server running SMTP and the like.

So, the distinction is pretty important. The Internet and WWW are not the same thing.

[Tom 7]

WWW is a subset of the internet. email is a subset of the internet etc etc. IRC was a subset of the internet. Nothing ever said WWW couldnt access email or IRC. It was just there were programs that people were familiar with that held sway for quite a while, even though the clients were easily re-written to work in the browser, well until MS and others decided to make it difficult,

[Anonymous Coward]

WWW is a subset of the internet

Not quite, although you have an edge of the answer in your hand. First off, WWW is a concept. HTTP is a protocol, as is DNS, SMTP etc. Secondly, the "Internet" is incorrectly used as the collective noun for all the fun parts of the stack that make the world wide web work, but technically the internet only refers to the network part - basically TCP/IP (which, by the way, is also a join of TCP and IP which are separate animals in their own right) with all the tools such as routing at various levels to make that work.

[localzuk]

Subset is somewhat the wrong term. WWW is a service that runs atop the Internet, as is IRC, as is email. They're not "subsets" of the Internet.

[david 12]

WWW is a folder on the server that runs HTTP. HTTP was the protocol provided by the service, that allowed you to download files from the server. WWW was the folder you put the WWW files in.

[that one in the corner]

WWW is the name of the server running HTTP. Hence http://www.myplace.org

The directory used as the document root for that server - that is htdocs, surely?[1][2]

[1] Yes, Laverne, it is.

[2] ok, many an httpd config allows for a www directory - especially if it is mapping http://www.myplace.org/~fred/ to /home/fred/www

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet is the WWW

You need to get yourself up to speed on the stack principle.

The NETWORK (the whole TCP/IP thingy with all its routing ability) was a US invention and started its life as ARPAnet. That grew, was very useful and is in general quite well appreciated to lug data around the place.

That network acts as a carrier for the protocols on top, such as FTP, telnet, email (SMTP/POP3/IMAP) et al, and this is where Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea of an approach that would enable interoperability for information exchange, and I don't have to go into the rest as you should be quite capable of using the HTTP element to dig up the detail.

What you call "the Internet" is technically only the carrier, with the World Wide Web being the thing you actually interface with. They're two separate layers on top of each other (OK, technically there are a lot more, but look up ISO stack if that is of interest). Yes, public use confuses the two often but for IT purposes you really ought to know the difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm only going to reply to one comment as that's all I need to do.

You have all proven my original point. The internet is and has been a lot more important that the WWW and yes I do know the difference and what the TCP/IP stack is and what a packet is and it's make up.

As I said I do not agree with calling one person the father of the WWW as if they were this great person who created it all. That is the way it is put across in the media. Try searching who created the internet. Sure you'll get some right answers but a lot will point to Sir Tim and that's wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

You still don't get it. It is the COMBINATION of the two that made the whole thing explode. The Internet was a thing well before the whole World Wide Web idea - I should know, I was using it. However, gopher and archie were not a patch on the explosive impact of the WWW concept on usability.

Maybe a different way of explaining will help, using a later similar event. I have used almost every phone since the original analogue Motorola brick (although I avoided that by buying the much slimmer NEC P3 and I had a Microtac as well), so I was also pretty much there when phones with new facilities started to arrive - as a matter of fact, I think I had the first Nokia Communicator in the UK due to my work (we needed it for *cough* research *cough* :) ).

However, smartphones really became THE thing everyone uses when Apple introduced the iPhone. Did it offer more? No, not really, but it made it so easy that anyone could use it instead of only the technically anointed - even setting up a conference call was a breeze with an iPhone.

From that point on we've had various organisations trying to get their own market going (including Microsoft doing what it does best: fail) which eventually settled into a duopoly between Android and iOS. A bit of a shame because the origins of Symbian could possibly have made for a phone with Psion's OPL to code mad things on the fly and totally forget to get off the right stop on a train (been there, done that), but I digress. We had phones, we had email and a smattering of services but what really greased the wheels of progress was an extreme step change in usability, and that is easy to trace back to Jobbs making a device so good he was able to break the then stranglehold operators had on their networks (instead of Apple paying to have phones allowed on an operator's network, the operators had to pay Apple - the impact was that great). This in turn then stimulated data transfer capability on the networks to the point that we're now looking at 5G and beyond.

The introduction of the WWW concept was to the internet what the iPhone was to phone networks - revolutionary.

[heyrick]

The motor is the car. Who separates the two? How many times have you heard someone say I'm going to take the motor to the shops when they really mean the car? Beside "motor" is the technology inside the car. The car is just something that you sit in to control the motor...

[jake]

"WWW != Internet ... that's a whole different invention"

No, the WWW is just an add-on to the foundation provided by Internet. The Internet would carry on without notice if the WWW were to disappear overnight. The WWW would collapse instantly if the Internet went away overnight.

[doublelayer]

They are related technologies. The WWW could continue if the internet shut down by using a different communication system, but since we don't have another world-wide communication system available to the general public, it would be a much smaller WWW and there would probably be multiple separate ones. For the same reason, I could complain about anyone who gets credit for the internet because you're just piggybacking on the existing inventions made for computers and communication systems, which would be similarly simplistic. The internet was an important invention, and HTTP and related technologies another one. Both are extremely important to the way we live life today, and fighting for who should get credit, or rather in the case of this argument who should be denied credit, is pointless and petty.

[GioCiampa]

"No, the WWW is just an add-on to the foundation provided by Internet. The Internet would carry on without notice if the WWW were to disappear overnight. The WWW would collapse instantly if the Internet went away overnight."

That was exactly my point.

[Charlie Clark]

I think you're the only one complaining about the web becoming popular: the web is one of the main things that made the internet popular. Sure, it couldn't have worked without the internet but it was the web that really meant that siloed systems such as Compuserve and Minitel would have to open up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is complaining about the web becoming popular? I just find it disingenuous they attribute it to one man who created a GUI method to view web pages. Didn't even create a search engine or DNS. No DNS no http.

[Anonymous Coward]

@A/C

Guess you're just pissed off because it was a non yank who developed something that fucked over the American Gopher?

Guess they should have sanctioned Cern. Like they do everyone nowadays that dares to threaten their "superior" industries

[jake]

Wow.

Have you any other xenophobic thoughts to share with us?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you ought to lay off whatever you're using, be it caffeine or something stronger.

Try to remain at least civil.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm English thanks.

[doublelayer]

"I just find it disingenuous they attribute it to one man who [...]"

If you want to argue about disingenuous, you might want to learn what that one man actually did. It wasn't an invention of every internet-related technology used today, and nobody, especially him, ever said it was. Neither was it as limited as you claim.

"created a GUI method to view web pages."

Yes, he did that. And a GUI to edit them. Of course, what is a web page? If you asked a contemporary, they would have to guess at the details, because he also invented those as well. HTML was his invention, without which the web page concept isn't formalized. And that's just the page part. What makes it a web page? Part of it was the transfer protocol which he also invented, although it's a pretty simple protocol so it's not a really important or difficult invention. Except that doesn't do a web either, because that's still a one-to-one connection with a server. The part that makes a web is the URI system to identify resources from other ones, thus enabling hypertext (which already existed) to refer to other locations without having to agree on interoperability first. That's a short list of stuff that he invented.

"Didn't even create a search engine": No, he didn't. Why did he have to invent a search engine when the way he enabled global hypertext is the reason that search engines tend to work these days? He doesn't get the credit for inventing the search engine any more than the developers of TCP would get credit for his work, but each step allowed the development and proliferation of the next to happen the way it did.

"or DNS. No DNS no http.": Wrong. No DNS a much more annoying experience using HTTP, but it can and has been done. Those protocols are independent and you are free to use one and not use the other.

[jake]

"you might want to learn what that one man actually did."

Took existing so-called "hyper text" and a markup language and added networking? Not exactly unheard of at the time (I've mentioned Gopher here recently ... there were others that also pre-dated the WWW). It just happened to be the variation on the theme that took off. As a result, this whole worshiping at the church of TB-L comes off as the general population not understanding the concept of survival bias.

[doublelayer]

Their characterization, that he only wrote a browser, is wrong. Your characterization is also wrong. Of course it wasn't unheard of, but it also didn't exist in a format like that and the format that was created has remained useful in a form quite similar to its original form today, rather than being superseded.

This is similar to the development of the internet. You could make a similarly derisive, simplistic statement about how the internet wasn't revolutionary: "they took computers that used digital data and had them send that data, still in digital form, over a phone line. Big deal." That is inaccurate about how the internet works and why it is actually new, and it ignores that the internet is still in use today, without having to be reinvented. Nor do I worship TBL's contributions, just recognize that they are important to a piece of technology that is very common in the world today, and thus his work has proved important.

[localzuk]

Yet, here we are. Using the WWW... So, if other systems existed and what TBL did was not overly important? Why didn't those other systems take off like TBL's system did?

This arguing against what TBL did seems really bizarre to me. Do people argue that Ford didn't do anything great with his release of the Model T? There were other cars around at the time too. Your argument doesn't really hold any water to me.

[captain veg]

This is wholly true, and I don't believe that anyone would seriously argue otherwise.

It turns out that the markup language was capable of expressing the UI of proper applications, whether on PC or mobile, once CSS was mixed in.

Possibly not ideally, but capable nonetheless.

That seems to be enough.

-A.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try googling who created the internet. Give it a few years and the hero worship will wipe all the other people that actually created the internet away from history.

[localzuk]

The very first result links to a very well documented history of the Internet, from Baran, Robers and KleinRock to Bob Khan and Vint Cerf.

[doublelayer]

Let's see if DuckDuckGo is affected by the "worship" you suggest must be there:

1. Computer scientists Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn are credited with inventing the Internet communication protocols we use today and the system referred to as the Internet.

2. Bob Kahn, now at DARPA, and Vint Cerf, at Stanford University, published research in 1974 that evolved into the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), two protocols of the Internet protocol suite.

3. The birth date of the internet is widely considered to be Jan. 1, 1983, but the road to creating it started long before the technology required for the internet even existed. [...] According to History.com, “the first practical schematics for the internet would not arrive until the early 1960s,” when Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider came up with a vision of using computer networks to communicate. [...] In the late 1960s, with the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the “first workable prototype of the Internet” was born.

Does your theory expect that eventually the worship will insert TBL into the search results so he can push out all the people who are actually in the search results? While some of those articles do mention him, they mention him later than these other guys and they explain that what he built was a part of the system we use today, not the whole thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bit more than that, so maybe you should spend some time reading about how the whole concept came to be and what effort it took to get it accepted and normalised in such a way that it managed to fight off attempts to build monopolies around it for over 30 years.

[Down not across]

HTTP works just fine without DNS. Of course it is more convenient to use easier (often, not always) to remember names than bunch of octets.

[jake]

"I think you're the only one complaining about the web becoming popular"

Nobody said anything about "becoming popular".

[Anonymous Coward]

Good, bad or ugly

HTML gave me an interesting, well paid, career.

And, ultimately, a very comfortable retirement.

[MyffyW]

Re: Good, bad or ugly

It gave us some rather curious leisure pursuits, previously poorly rendered on VHS or Super8. Thankfully I have not stared in any of them.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: Good, bad or ugly

And that ladies and gentlemen was why the web really succeeded...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Good, bad or ugly

Well, I guess you can't stare, because too much, err, viewing, supposedly makes you go blind… ;-)

[Potemkine!]

I made my first web site in 1994. When it was put online, there were already 20,000 other web sites in the World. HoTMetaL helped to check HTML syntax.

This website was dynamic, through CGI which called a C-based program which generated HTML code for the answer.

At that time, the web was a fantastic toy for Universities, Research organisms and nerds. We thought it could make knowledge accessible for all, and be a tool for the enhancement of humanity.

And then it transformed into a mix of a tabloid, a sex-shop, a dark street and a branch of Hatred Inc.

[J.G.Harston]

*EVERY* form of communication

We've got this great invention called "printing", which will be able to break down infomation barriers and spread knowledge...

Ooops, who would have though it would transform into a mix of a tabloid, a sex-shop, a dark street and a branch of Hatred Inc.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: *EVERY* form of communication

Where there's muck smut there's brass.

[Potemkine!]

Re: *EVERY* form of communication

Not true. First, printing was (re)-invented to make money. Next, pamphlets were among the first printed materials, and they were widely used in England, France, and Germany from the early 16th century, often for religious or political propaganda. To the point that the activity of the French press in putting forth small tracts in favour of the Reformed religion caused the Sorbonne in 1523 to petition the king to abolish the diabolical art of printing.

The web at first was different, most of actors were idealistic dreamers making the Web for free.

[jake]

Re: *EVERY* form of communication

"most of actors were idealistic dreamers making the Web for free."

You are looking at the past through rose tinted specs[0] ... May I introduce you to James Clark (and Marc Andreessen)?

[J.G.Harston]

Re: *EVERY* form of communication

The first printers were idealistic dreamers dreaming of making information free. (as in free speech)

[doublelayer]

Allow me to introduce you to humanity.

Every major invention has been idealized by somebody, often the initial inventors. Often some of those ideals truly come to pass. Never are those absolute ideas met absolutely, because humans want to do bad things and they will use any tools available to do so.

It did make knowledge available to all, not every bit of knowledge, and not to all people equally, but there's a lot more availability than there used to be and it covers a lot more people than any previous system did. However, it enables people to post any information, correct or not, that they want. It's obvious that that was going to happen from the start, even if people hoped it wouldn't happen.

That's not unique to the web, the internet, the computer, electrical technology, or anything in particular. Any advancement produces some benefits, often the ones the idealists hope for but in a limited fashion, and some downsides. It's not even as if the downsides weren't predicted. Science fiction writers are good at coming up with ways that a technology completely breaks things, and although many of their dreams end up being unrealistic, others prove prescient.

[Nifty]

It was around 1995 for me, HTML composed in a text editor, photos scanned with a rollover handheld scanner (3rd time lucky). I ran a micro accommodation booking service through it.

[Howard Sway]

Software vendors weren’t interested, so giving it away became the best option

Amazing that none of them saw what it was going to be, and how rich it would have made them. What's not often remarked upon is how long it really took to take hold as the dominant internet service. Most people first saw it in those days as an additional add on service grudgingly offered by AOL / Compuserve, on top of their proprietary protocols, or getting their first taste of Netscape from coverdisks on computing magazines. And the number of sites was so small that the main way of finding stuff was through AltaVista who tried to classify the whole web into separate categories.

As usual, the funky early days were a lot more fun before corporate mega-greed and market domination squeezed out the entertaining experimentation to the margins. But it's a credit to the openness of the underlying tech that this will never be totally squished..

[DJV]

Re: Software vendors weren’t interested, so giving it away became the best option

Even by 1995 and the release of Win 95, Bill Gates still didn't "get" it straight away, which is why IE only appeared later on in the 95 Plus Pack.

[heyrick]

Re: Software vendors weren’t interested, so giving it away became the best option

Google came along and was fast and nimble and it swept away the hulking mass that Altavista had become, what with its inefficient markup and inserted advertisements.

Look at what Google is now...

[M. T. Ness]

Re: Software vendors weren’t interested, so giving it away became the best option

Google had a more sustainable business idea. Alltheweb was bought by Microsoft just before the introduction of Bing.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-17-fi-preview17.1-story.html

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Software vendors weren’t interested, so giving it away became the best option

"Amazing that none of them saw what it was going to be, and how rich it would have made them."

But would it have made then rich? I think its success was because it wasn't one company's private property. I think the likelihood is that any single company would have screwed it up with a whole stack of dick moves.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Software vendors weren’t interested, so giving it away became the best option

I think the likelihood is that any single company would have screwed it up with a whole stack of dick moves.

Microsoft certainly tried its level best once it figured out that the Net was a tad more important than it had originally thought (a case of "not invented here?" We'll never know).

[Anonymous Coward]

The EU would have had been a little busy in the process of being created at the time, since the Maastricht treaty only became effective at the end of 1993.

And the CERN was not an EEC project in the first place, so I'd have liked more information on why its member states were not consulted at all. Were they even less interested?

[abend0c4]

The Commission were quite active in promoting R&D at the time through the Framework programmes, Eureka and other initiatives. They were, though, promoting standards-based (OSI) networking which was seen then as a counterweight to the dominance of proprietary networking protocols originating from US companies (this was a time when the biggest research networks were based on DECnet). I can no longer recall what the status of CERN was at that stage in terms of participating in the R&D programme; I suspect it probably couldn't have been a project lead and it would have required a partner in an EU state to propose a project for funding. An early version of the web was demonstrated at a RARE (now TERENA) European Networking Conference but the opportunity didn't really seem to get picked up.

[Anonymous Coward]

First web server outside CERN

Fun fact: The first web server outside CERN came up on an IBM mainframe and was written in REXX (according to B-L's book). It was a university library catalogue.

[jake]

Re: First web server outside CERN

"The first web server outside CERN came up on an IBM mainframe and was written in REXX (according to B-L's book)."

Tim's wrong. We had experimental WWW servers at Unis all over the West Coast before IBM's was running. The first one was running at Berkeley a couple evenings after the CERN release, the next was at Stanford the following morning, followed very closely by UCLA et al.

Perhaps he meant "the first non-CERN based WWW server"?

_{Not that there was much for them to do ... but it invented a lot of temporary busy work as undergrads were hired to make much of Gopher-space available on the WWW ... until they realized it would be easier to add the gopher protocol to the browser. Hindsight's 20/20 ...}

[Anonymous Coward]

1994 was a big year for file formats.

This year also celebrates(*) 30 years of PDF - with HTML, I would argue the two most successful document formats on the planet, although LaTex takes the award for oldest (and MS Word the award for most pernicious).

[Tom 7]

Re: 1994 was a big year for file formats.

PDF - what the web would be if designed by a monopolistic printer manufacturer.

[Andrew Watson]

Out of interest, I dug out a slide I wrote about the Web in 1995 as part of a report for the ANSA distributed systems project (PDF, 35KB):

https://c.gmx.com/@557565171149575755/SJjkEBEURHex7CZBDrVCIg

[John 61]

Democratising inforrmation

was the goal of Mr Berners-Lee's invention/agglomeration, but giving it away to the public was a bad idea. I remember saying to my sister (back in 1998) "all this will end in tears", which it has. Mr BL's intentions may have been good, but fraudsters and con persons in other countries having Auntie Ethel's bank login (and a direct connection enabling them to edit the HTML) wasn't quite what he had in mind...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Democratising inforrmation

On that basis knocking pieces of stone together to create sharp blades was also a bad idea.

[Steve Channell]

Tim was a contractor, and the web was a side-projects

HTML was based on SGML (the standardized version of GML) and doesn't recognize line-feed because it needed to be interoperable be ASCII and EBCDIC encoding.

When Jeff Bezos launched his book store on the WWW, USENET was full of mocking comments of the "idiot" that didn't realize that "books were history"