Tim Berners-Lee, physicist and computer scientist, invented the
World Wide Web. Ubiquitous as it is, it's like reading a book by the inventor
of bread, like sitting down and having a chat with Bell, Marconi, Farnsworth,
Edison, or Ford. The difference we discover is that Berners-Lee wrote this
program for the exchange of information via the Internet for the betterment
of the world and not for profit. His lack of desire to become wealthy from
it was perplexing and suspect by the computing world. I cringe each time
I see Microsoft trying to come up with another proprietary version of HTML
(HyperText Markup Language), flying in the face of everything that Berners-Lee
is trying to preserve. This means that you would get features in their
Web browser [Internet Explorer] that would be unviewable or be crippling
to other browsers. If there were 2 or 3 or 15 World Wide Webs, there would
be no World Wide Web. We were there in 1990 when the big three online services
(Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy) could not send e-mail to each other. Then
came the revision of each of their software programs to follow Internet
e-mail protocols. Hard to imagine here in 2000 when we freely exchange
e-mail
addresses.
It gets a little technical but you could easily skip over parts that are incomprehensible if you've never touched a PC. The point of the book is to show how the World Wide Web began, evolved, and how some have tried to control or own it. Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to shepherd the Web through new developments and mediate disputes among users. He wants the Web to remain open and to encourage innovation, but not the kind of innovation that any one company can claim for its own to the detriment of everyone else. He is the anti-Gates.
Read this book and gain an admiration for a humble man who, having invented a medium, tells us that the birth of his first child was a far greater event in his life. Imagine what a world it could be if the power driven moguls who run our political parties and corporations could bring this kind of humanity to their work. Our politicians and business people talk family but remember it was a CEO's kid who shot Reagan.
He reveals that he and his wife recently were exploring the Unitarian church. He stumbled into the thought that they are structurally akin to his own philosophy in creating the Web. It was an openness to ideas that appealed to him that he didn't get from other religions. He is a very private person and didn't elaborate much further. Berners-Lee was once burned by an interviewer for pulling a sound byte out of context that caused a stock market ripple, so he shuns TV but he has appeared on Charlie Rose. Catch him if you ever get the opportunity.
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