Creator of the technology which makes
the AACS IntraNet possible
Tim Berners-Lee
| Father of the World Wide Web
Creator of the technology which makes |
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Tim Berners-Lee |
Looking beyond the simple text-transmission methods then available, Berners-Lee began searching for a better way for himself and his research colleagues to communicate by computer. His work saw its first implementation in 1990 and it was proto-typed in 1990-91. By 1992, Berners-Lee and his associates had created and defined the URL, HTTP, and HTML specifications which made the Web possible—and upon which the Web and our intranet still depend. Beginning in early 1993, the Web's use began to become more and more widespread.
Today, Berners-Lee works for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he heads the non-profit group, the World Wide Web Consortium, which helps to set standards for "the Web."
Many of our AACS associates will remember when we first signed up for Internet access through Owensboro Community College in November 1994 that the World Wide Web "browser" then available to us was the text-only Lynx browser. Lynx was created (in 1992) by Lou Montulli, then an undergraduate at Kansas University. A browser, by the way, is the software by which one navigates in and through Web-based material. The Netscape Navigator 3.0 you are now using to view this document is your browser software.
A graphical browser, Mosaic, was developed later in 1992 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbanna-Champaign. Many of us today use Netscape, first called Mosaic Netscape, then later called Netscape Navigator, which was co-developed and created in 1993 by Marc Andreeson, the 22-year-old "kid" who co-created Mosaic while then with NCSA. The first Web developers' conference was held in the Summer of 1993 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Berners-Lee and Andreeson (the "kid's" name tag simply said Marc, as though presuming he was already a star in the Web universe) were there.
It doesn't seem possible, but Netscape was first marketed in October 1994. Today, Netscape dominates the browser market. Netscape also produced much of the graphical richness now in the Web-based documents and applications. Netscape created, for example, the image "tag" and much of the other HTML coding which provides creativity, flexibility, and flair to HTML and related documents. Berners-Lee and his serious-minded fellow academics took particular exception to Andreeson and Netscape adding graphics and panache to their original HTML code and browser capabilities.
More information on the development of the Internet is included in a paper your Webmaster did for Owensboro's Investigators Club. To review that paper, click on its title: "Mind Weavers" paper on the history and impact of the Internet/World Wide Web. Portions of the above material concerning Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreeson are repeated in the paper—actually, the above material is excerpted from the "Mind Weavers" paper.
Glossary of Internet / computing terms.
More World Wide Web and Tim Berners-Lee References
"None of us is as smart as all of us." So goes a little piece of advice likely endorsed by all of us. But while we share this at an intellectual level we "established" folk are also bound within a highly individualistic culture. Things are changing very fast, and some of us— though not our youngsters—are having more than a little trouble adapting to the pace of technological change and informational access—for which we tend to use the term: "overload."
In the sense of going ahead to arrange for, or signal one's approach, it's the Internet, then it appears, that's the harbinger of the long-anticipated Information Age. The Internet's two main functions are communication and information-sharing. In its beginning, the Internet was very much the sole possession of the academic community, and in their mind a tool for serious academic work. This is, of course, not exactly how it has all worked out to date, but it will, I predict, ultimately foster that goal as well as more perhaps frivolous pursuits. It is creating a world of "intimate strangers," meaning that, people the world over can now interact closely with one another via the Internet although they may not know one another or ever meet face to face.
The Internet is a model "organic structure" which is freeform and decentralized, even nebulous—the Internet is typiccally depicted as a cloud juxtaposed between sending and receiving computer systems. The Internet is based on a natural, organismic, almost "biological" model, which is "impervious to pinpoint attack," and designed to repair itself or re-route information flow on its own. It has no boundaries and is not owned or controlled by any one organization or country—though there are "controlling" entities—the Internet Network Information Center [InterNIC], which assigns addresses and domain names, and the Internet Society [ISOC], which develops specifications, sets standards, and approves protocols. Operationally, it is truly in the world-wide "public domain."
The Internet has evolved from the Defense Department via a 1960s Defense Agency Research Projects Administration (DARPA) project called ARPANET. It was based on a set of protocols which allowed diverse computer systems to communicate with one another. ARPANET linked research universities' computers and promoted the sharing of information among researchers. It was also intended to substantially survive a nuclear attack. But it was the National Science Foundation, though its NSFnet (whose funding and operations terminated in April 1995), which developed and subsidized the basic framework of the Internet. Douglas Rushkoff, who has been called the "heir to (Marshall) McLuhan" as the interpreter for the masses what the new media—cybermedia—means, elaborates on the initial development of the Internet in his 1994 book, Media Virus:
Imitating a complex natural system like a coral reef, the ARPANET system depended on the immense interconnectedness of its parts. So it seems the most hierarchically inclined, power-based segment of our culture—the military—developed the most Gaian-spirited complex ever created by human beings. This self-similar map of interconnected nodes is an automatically self-regulating organism. No one individual can control what information spreads where. As one of the fathers of the system, John Gilmore, said in an often quoted remark, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." An attempt to block a communication at one node will simply prompt the network to find one of millions of possible alternative routes. In a biosphere the more possible links and "phase locks" there are between members, the more opportunity nature has of regulating and neutralizing disturbances. Similarly the dominant law on the computer net is a natural tendency toward self-determination through chaotic means.
By the time ARPANET was "ended" in 1989, no one seemed to notice that the organization did not exist anymore. It didn't matter; the powerful network it had initiated was here to stay. Many universities and commercial computer networks had already become nodes on the system, developed their own communications protocols, and had been sending each other electronic mail, conferencing, and archiving data. The network became known as the "Internet"—a meta-network linking up other networks around the world. Scientists and other researchers used the network to share advances from each other, and corporations used it to send information from one site to another.
The Internet's latest and most awe-inspiring iteration is the World Wide Web. It is the World Wide Web to which the title of my paper refers. Web pages and the intelligence behind them are "linked" and Web users roam the informational universe as they would "explore a natural environment," says Douglass Rushkoff. The linking capability of the Web, Rushkoff also points out, is the currency of one's ability to influence the rest of the Web. That influence "is wholly determined by how many pages are linked to it," he says. It's analogous to the correlation that the more physical "connections" (synapses) inside our brains the more brain-processing power we should have via the chemical and "electric" functions that traverse them.
Tim Berners-Lee is known as the "Father of the World Wide Web." Berners-Lee is a scientist at the European Labratory for Particle Physics (known as CERN—by its French acronym) near Geneva, Switzerland. Robert Reid in Architects of the Web (1997) says that Berners-Lee was "tired of the hunt-and-peck process of locating and obtaining data." Berners-Lee, beginning in 1989, created the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which defines the "Web"content, along with the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which provides the underlying and transparent transmission standards and protocols (TCP/IP, or Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol) for the Web technology, and URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), which enable the point-and-click movement between HTML-based documents known as "pages." The TCP/IP organizes information into tidy little bits ("packets") of information before transmitting it over telephone lines.
Looking beyond the simple text-transmission methods then available, Berners-Lee began searching for a better way for himself and his research colleagues to communicate by computer. His work saw its first implementation in 1990 and it was proto-typed in 1990-91. By 1992, Berners-Lee and his associates had created and defined the URL, HTTP, and HTML specifications which made the Web possible—and upon which the Web still depends. Beginning in early 1993, the Web's use began to become more and more widespread.
The Web has taken the world by storm like nothing else I've seen in my lifetime. Architects of the Web states it this way, "The Internet has enticed more people to jump from the security of their well-situated jobs and lifestyles into the uncertain but heady world of the Internet than any other phenomenon since the California gold rush of 1849." Douglass Rushkoff says in Media Virus:
Intentionally developed as a decentralized web, the computer networks have already evolved into complex chaotic systems, capable of feedback and iteration on a scale still unfathomable by even their most enthusiastic participants. Computer networks are fractal in composition, with large networks of computers self-similarly reflecting smaller linked groups, which themselves reflect the inner workings of a single machine, which itself reflects the shape and structure of the software within it, the commands within the software, and the bytes of binary data within those commands. As feedback devices, computers provide unprecedented expressive capabilities to anyone who can get access to a terminal and a modem. A tiny laptop in Montana can be as high a leverage point as a system of mainframes in Washington, D.C.; no text message sent out onto the net has any more intrinsic power to affect the whole system than any other. As an opportunity for iteration, the computer and its networks—which actually work by cycling information in nearly infinite loops—have begun to frighten those whose power is based on limiting the public's ability to disseminate and amplify its observations and intentions.
How this all came to be is significant. Tracking the development of the current computer net reveals why it is so essentially chaotic; both the conscious plans of its constructors and what can be considered deeply "natural causes" led to the formation of a new kind of wilderness—a network of roots and vines so vast that it has the potential to modify everything it contacts and utterly change the very landscape of the forest.
A graphical browser, Mosaic, was developed later in 1992 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbanna-Champaign. Many of us today use Netscape, first called Mosaic Netscape, then later called Netscape Navigator, which was co-developed and created in 1993 by Marc Andreeson, the 22-year-old "kid" who co-created Mosaic while then with NCSA. The first Web developers' conference was held in the Summer of 1993 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Berners-Lee and Andreeson (the "kid's" name tag simply said Marc, as though presuming he was already a star in the Web universe) were there.
It doesn't seem possible, but Netscape was first marketed in October 1994. Today, Netscape dominates the browser market. Netscape also produced much of the graphical richness now in the Web-based documents and applications. Netscape created, for example, the image "tag" and much of the other HTML coding which provides creativity, flexibility, and flair to HTML and related documents. Berners-Lee and his serious-minded fellow academics took particular exception to Andreeson and Netscape adding graphics and panache to their original HTML code and browser capabilities.
It's been a heady ride these last few years. A recent book was entitled 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business. Those 1,000 days cover the period between late 1993 and early 1997 when the World Wide Web was in the process of "captivating the awareness if not direct participation of literally everyone in the United States, transforming the technology industry, drawing the attention and involvement of almost every company..., stirring up legal quandries and public issues..., and accumulating a critical mass of more than 40 million users." So says Robert Reid in Architects of the Web. Up until early 1993 the Web was, more or less, in an "experimental" phase. The next phase, ending with the close of 1996, was called the "novelty" phase. We are now in what Reid calls the "utility/takeoff" phase. By the close of 1999, Reid says the Web will have achieved the next and final state, "ubiquity."
Don Tapscott has written a book entitled The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence. "Networked intelligence." I like that. And that is what I think the Internet and its World Wide Web are all about—and what this paper is all about.
But not everyone agrees that this development is good. Many self-perceived individualistic American adults seem to fear the so-called "colonial organism" and the "herd mentality" that they think all this represents and leads to. Perhaps they conjure up images of The Borg as depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation. There, The Borg is presented as a regimented, mechanistic, ultimately dictatorial, collective entity where the "individuals" that comprise it can only march in lock step to their collective will, as personified in one supreme collective mind-entity which "thinks" for all. Out of the paranoia that associates itself with such fears come those of the Timothy McVeigh ilk who imagine conspiracies against their individualism, self-determinism, and rights.
But I see the process of achieving "networked intelligence" as only natural and highly organismic. It's just part of our evolution to a higher state of being. The "Web" truly represents a biological model. Indeed, what I see hapening in this age of transition between the Industrial Age and the Information Age is a dramatic movement away from mechanistic forms. Throughout society and its social systems things appear to me to be moving inexorably toward biological and (Peter) Senge-type "systems" models.
And Rushkoff also reassures us in his 1996 book Playing the Future that our most of our youth understand—even if we older folks don't—that they sacrifice no individuality in a networked, dynamical system. "Networked, each member has more, not less influence over the entire group. Our kids may be working toward "a global consciousness"—"a leap forward into meta-consciousness." I think he's right on target. Humanity will not change, only humanity's tools. Individuality will be both preserved and empowered. I believe our children and their progeny will be better equipped to cope with challenges and also produce higher forms of human culture, spirituality, and endeavor. And Rushkoff says that we as adults should "at least entertain the possibility that technology and the turbulence it promotes stands a chance of restoring rather than further distancing us from our spiritual natures. It would mean dispensing with a preordained but hierarchical model of the world and learning how to accept an existence that is ever-changing and fundamentally fractal," he says.
Rushkoff also states, "We are moving into chaos. Yet if we begin to explore and recognize the underlying patterns in that chaos, we will be a lot more comfortable" There are plenty of repeating patterns—sometimes called fractals (patterns repeated at ever smaller scales)—in nature. These are our "footholds in the chaos." ... The adults' "deep-rooted fear of technology and the intimacy that it portends is transformed by ‘the children of chaos' into the kids' sense that for humanity to face the obstacles ahead, they will need to develop, somehow, into a greater coordinated being. This is our greatest social and spiritual challenge, and the children of chaos address it with the optimistic faith of zealots."
Rushkoff says in Media Virus:
Much of the established big-money media are "directly opposed to the possibilities opened by our new technologies," Rushkoff says. Recent "cyber thriller" movies like The Net, for example, convey fear and danger associated with "going on-line." Rushkoff, though, reassures us: It "may be dangerous to one's worldview, but not ones physical being."
We are moving toward "global interdependency" fostered by our "planet-embracing media forces."
"Screenagers (Rushkoff's term for our young people) believe the individuals making up our world must be trusted with the information and tools to analyze it. Thanks to media and a willingness to use it, real people are going to gain the ability to influence the direction of our body politique. Our only choice is whether to arm them with the skills to effect successful stewardship," he says. Our kids, "empowered cybernauts," view their journey as one toward "empowerment and expansion. They spend their energies doing what they enjoy in order to get to do it some more." Rushkoff says. He adds, "Most adults are afraid of play and suspicious of fun."
But the kids know their jobs will "get easier and more fun when they've got better tools" (my emphasis). They expect, literally, to get "paid for playing." They also understand at an intuitive level that, as Rushkoff writes, "technology is the method by which we consciously rig the communicative fibers of our planetary brain." He also writes, "On the World Wide Web, just as in the well-designed town square, work, entertainment, and the civil society are interdependent and ultimately indistinguishable."
So where is all this taking us?
Consider this: Benjamin Franklin noted in 1780, "Man is a tool-making animal" Thomas Carlisle perhaps refined that in 1833 when he said, "Man is a tool-using animal." Werner Karl Heisenberg proclaimed in 1958 a profound truth we should all ponder relative to these thoughts tonight when he said, "Every tool carries the spirit by which it has been created."
That being true, were headed for some exciting and interesting times ahead. It is the Chinese, I believe, who have the blessing that says, "May you live in interesting times."
(Some of my friends tell me the saying is "May you live in uninteresting times"—presuming that this means less turbulence, but for our purposes here, let's stick with the former "blessing")
In our world of the future, "data and creativity will become the new currency" of the Information Age and mankind's idea-based culture. (But hasn't this, in truth, always been so? Haven't the more creative among us always been in the lead harness?)
We will make a living "by selling what we generate from our minds and on our own computers as text, image, and code." The new commodity to sell is: Creativity! It's a resource that has an "infinite supply; it's environmentally safe, culturally valuable, and even fun to make," writes Douglas Rushkoff in Playing the Future.
Networked intelligence, shared creative work, building upon the readily-available storehouse of accumulated knowledge, and the enhanced human interactions made possible through our transforming cybermedia will enable quantum leaps in all we can devise...in the blessings we can bestow, the challenges we can meet, the destiny we can realize—and, yes, perhaps as well, the havoc we can wreak. There is possibly no limit to what mankind, together, can conceive and bring to pass. For indeed, None of us is as smart as all of us.
Ronald Lee Logsdon Scientific Topic for the Investigators Club April 18, 1997
| Web Surfer Demographics |
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| Number of U.S. Web surfers | 7.5 million | 60 million | 95 million |
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