Twenty-five years ago, on March 12th, 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. There he put forth a proposal to make information sharing possible over computers, using nodes and links to create a ‘web’ that would eventually stretch worldwide and become the modern Internet. Now after he disseminated that proposal, Berners-Lee has called for the internet he invented to stay free and open.
In a guest post on Google’s official blog, Berners-Lee asked Internet users to press for the development of a “digital bill of rights” that would “advance a free and open web for everyone.” Berners-Lee hailed the day’s anniversary as a day to celebrate, but also warned that internet users should think and act ahead of “key decisions on the governance and future of the Internet” that he says are “looming.”
Campaign for Internet freedom
In order to maintain unfettered access to an internet that is gradually becoming more restricted, Berners-Lee points to the Web at 25 campaign. The Web at 25 campaign, along with fellow net neutrality campaign home Web We Want, incorporates Berners-Lee’s bill of rights concept as a part of its future plan for a free and open Internet.
On creating the web Sir Tim said: ‘I never expected all these cats’. A graduate of Oxford University, he wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.
Berners-Lee is Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence ( CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he also heads the Decentralised Information Group (DIG). He is also a Professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK.
Tim Berners-Lee celebrated the 25th birthday of the web by outlining his plans for an internet ‘Magna Carta’. He uses Firefox as well as Safari, Opera and Chrome; and posted a picture of his dog online.
Snowden “should be protected”
Although Berners-Lee wouldn’t give a definite answer when asked whether he thought ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden was a “hero or villain” he did say that he thought Snowden “should be protected” and that “we should have ways of protecting people like him.”
“We can try to design perfect systems of government, and they will never be perfect, and when they fail, then the whistleblower may be all that saves society,” he told Reddit.
When asked if he felt a little like Robert Oppenheimer – one of the primary engineers working on the Manhattan Project – Berners-Lee was equanimous:
“No, not really. The web is — primarily neutral — a tool for humanity. When you look at humanity you see the good and the bad, the wonderful and the awful. A powerful tool can be used for good or ill. Things which are really bad are illegal on the web as they are off it. On balance, communication is good thing I think: much of the badness comes from misunder-standing.”
Berners-Lee also addressed criticism for his perceived hypocrisy in calling for a more open web, but also supporting digital rights management (DRM) to be built in to HTML5, allowing manufacturers all sorts of methods of limiting how you view content online – from stopping you copy and pasting text, to monitoring what you do with saved files outside the browser.
KEY POINTS ABOUT WWW
Web is not Internet : The internet is the network of computers – the infrastructure of connections and servers – that shuttle data around the globe. The web is just one of the applications that use this connection (others include Skype, email and BitTorrent) to deliver data in the form of web pages.
Web was nearly called ‘Tim’ : When Berners-Lee first outlined his ideas for the web in a scientific paper in 1989 he referred to it as the ‘mesh’, though he also considered other names including one in honour of himself – TIM, or, The Information Mine.
This wasn’t an entirely serious proposal but it’s interesting to note that Berners-Lee’s original ‘mesh’ name is finding some traction again among a group of web activists hoping to re-build the web as the ‘Meshnet’ – a re-configured Internet that is harder to spy on.
The web was born on an Apple computer (sort of).
When Apple’s founder Steve Jobs was booted from his company in 1985, he started up rival firm NeXT. The first NeXT computer came out in 1988 and although sales were small (around 50,000 units shipped in total), it was on a NeXT computer that Bereners-Lee first set up the World Wide Web.
The only hint that this was more than a regular PC was a hand-written note on the box reading “This machine is a server.
DO NOT POWER DOWN!!!”
Internet was born free – but it might not continue that way: When the internet (that’s the infrastructure remember) was designed it was decided that there would be no centralised form of control and Berners-Lee was thinking in the same way when he unleashed the web to the world for free.
These decisions were incredibly momentous and have enabled what web aficionados like to refer as “free innovation” – the idea that if you’ve got a bright idea for the web then you can make it happen. You don’t have to ask anyone – you just do it.
Everyone from Google to Facebook to Amazon made their millions – their billions in fact – off the back of this central precept, but some people (Berners-Lee included) think the era of the free Internet is under threat.
The first ever website is still running. Quite logically the first ever webpage was one that explained what the hell the web actually was. Berners-Lee created info.cern.ch in 1991, and although the site has not been constantly accessible since then, in 2013 Cern restored it to its original URL which you can browse here.
50pc of the web is in English
Currently more than 50 per cent of the web is in English (the next most frequently used language is Russian, with around 6 per cent) but experts predict that more than half of content online by 2024 could be in a script other than Latin. The web can only get bigger.
Like civilizations, the web has different ‘ages’. So far, we’ve only really had two of these – Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. These are distinct eras per se, but simply useful terms to describe how the early web went from a collection of static, read-only webpages to the social web (blogs, tweets, uploading and sharing) that we see today.
It’s said that Web 3.0 will be known as the “semantic web”, one that adapts to information in different contexts so that when you search something like “what shall I eat tonight” it will know more about your preferences, where you live and what’s been recommend in your area.
A billionth of a billionth of a gram
There’s some very rough maths behind this based on the weight of all the electrons in the tubes of the internet. Professor John Kubiatowicz calculated that filling a 4GB Kindle would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram (0.000000000000000001g.)
Scaling this amount of data up gives us the 50 gram weight for the web – although this is a little out of date, considering the guys who made the calculation were basing their strawberry estimate on the size of the web in 2006.
Source: Weekly Holiday
