The www was a fairly obvious idea that was just waiting for the right technology to power It. It would not have been possible to keep it to yourself and charge for it.
This statement reads to me to be heavily hindsight biased.
CERN wasn't exactly a place filled with idiots, yet the article even says that Tim Berners-Lee's boss thought the concept was a little eccentric and only gave in because Tim Berners-Lee fought for it.
Unless you're saying the concept is simple? In which case yes, most brilliant ideas that are hard to have are made by elegantly combining things to make a "simple" result.
The really annoying thing about those ideas is you sit there and kick yourself thinking, "that's so simple, why didn't I think of that"
There's a very different possible future where he instead went private and sold it, and I honestly have no idea how to work out how successful the web would have been in that world.
A good chunk of the web's impact is it was how easy it was to adopt, so I doubt we would have seen as much success as we do see now, as one of the bedrocks of our current ecosystem.
We might even have seen a similar situation to unix and linux, where a theoretical proprietary web that was released eventually was rewritten in an open-source format, but with lots of fragmentation of the ecosystem.
Surely hypertext and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu were well known to most people in the field by the time Berners-Lee did his work?
If Ted Nelson hadn't been so obsessed with making it pay we might have had the web sooner. Whether that would be a good thing or not is debatable though as the Internet was not available when he started.
Hypertext systems precede the web, I was using hypertext documents on CompuServe in the late 80s. It's hard to disagree given what was available at the time that putting the hypertext documents on another kind of network was a natural progression.
The world-wide web wasn't a "fairly obvious" idea at all. It only seems so in hindsight. Private networks are one thing, but a shared space offering a common, open way to host, publish, view and locate content that the entire world can participate it ?
Sure, eventually it could have happened but it may not have happened for several decades.
I'm am no history buff but several decades seems way off. A lot of the pieces were already there: addressing (FTP), hyperlink (hypertext), multi media documents, world wide network, ...
IMO his contribution is the overall architecture.
Agreed. I remember back then thinking what the fuss was all about. There already was Gopher and FTP, and connecting these two occurred at least in my mind back then, so it should have been trivial to most people :)
The important thing for it to succeed was to have a large enough group of people using the same standards. That was probably a (very) hard thing to accomplish, and perhaps Berners-Lee played a large role in that?
And yet at that time we already had a stranglehold of Compuserve and AOL. The talk was of walled gardens, safe spaces compared to the horrific wilds of the open Internet. The web broke down those walls.
This was exactly my thought when reading the article, I understand the cult to Berners-Lee as being one of "the good ones", but I don't subscribe to the idea that, if he had not given it away, the web as we know it would not exist.
I'm sure we can all think of cases where a core technology was kept private and eventually died in favor of an open version, the same would have happened here.
The article says it best "In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free"
Minitel in France, Btx in Germany and undoubtedly other system already had millions of users when the WWW was "invented", and were arguably what it was the next generation of. It was quite the improvement, but yeah, the article sounds too much like "there was nothing, then I came along and now we have the WWW, so listen to me".
Folcon|5 months ago
This statement reads to me to be heavily hindsight biased.
CERN wasn't exactly a place filled with idiots, yet the article even says that Tim Berners-Lee's boss thought the concept was a little eccentric and only gave in because Tim Berners-Lee fought for it.
Unless you're saying the concept is simple? In which case yes, most brilliant ideas that are hard to have are made by elegantly combining things to make a "simple" result.
The really annoying thing about those ideas is you sit there and kick yourself thinking, "that's so simple, why didn't I think of that"
There's a very different possible future where he instead went private and sold it, and I honestly have no idea how to work out how successful the web would have been in that world.
A good chunk of the web's impact is it was how easy it was to adopt, so I doubt we would have seen as much success as we do see now, as one of the bedrocks of our current ecosystem.
We might even have seen a similar situation to unix and linux, where a theoretical proprietary web that was released eventually was rewritten in an open-source format, but with lots of fragmentation of the ecosystem.
ninalanyon|5 months ago
If Ted Nelson hadn't been so obsessed with making it pay we might have had the web sooner. Whether that would be a good thing or not is debatable though as the Internet was not available when he started.
zzzeek|5 months ago
lenkite|5 months ago
Sure, eventually it could have happened but it may not have happened for several decades.
lugu|5 months ago
ab5tract|5 months ago
In fact, the only surprising feature of www is that no one bothered to include bidirectional linking, to disastrous consequence.
smokel|5 months ago
The important thing for it to succeed was to have a large enough group of people using the same standards. That was probably a (very) hard thing to accomplish, and perhaps Berners-Lee played a large role in that?
sys_64738|5 months ago
iand|5 months ago
mpeg|5 months ago
I'm sure we can all think of cases where a core technology was kept private and eventually died in favor of an open version, the same would have happened here.
The article says it best "In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free"
luckylion|5 months ago
sys_64738|5 months ago