Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a report for CERN, the Euorpean Organization for Nuclear Research, that his boss, Mike Sendall, described as "vague, but exciting." The report concerned "the management of general information about
accelerators and experiments at CERN," and it "discusse[d] the problems of loss of
information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a
distributed hypertext system."
Why do I mention nuclear research and management of information about accelerators? Well, if the name Tim Berners-Lee rings a bell, you already know that the answer has something to do with the web. What you may not know is that the web turns 20 today. That report described what would become the web, and CERN is hosted a celebration of its 20th anniversay earlier today.
I first encountered the web in 1993 or 1994 when I heard of this thing called Mosaic. There wasn't a lot available then, but I could see that it was likely to be useful, but I never imagined how ubiquitous it would become and how it would change the way that I do my work.
So if anyone ever asks you about serendipitous inventions that spring from basic research and have large practical effects, ask them how long it has been since they looked at their bank statement on the web or since they bought a book or since they downloaded a track from iTunes or since they watched a video on YouTube or since they read a newspaper or magazine in their favorite web browser or....
Why do I mention nuclear research and management of information about accelerators? Well, if the name Tim Berners-Lee rings a bell, you already know that the answer has something to do with the web. What you may not know is that the web turns 20 today. That report described what would become the web, and CERN is hosted a celebration of its 20th anniversay earlier today.
I first encountered the web in 1993 or 1994 when I heard of this thing called Mosaic. There wasn't a lot available then, but I could see that it was likely to be useful, but I never imagined how ubiquitous it would become and how it would change the way that I do my work.
So if anyone ever asks you about serendipitous inventions that spring from basic research and have large practical effects, ask them how long it has been since they looked at their bank statement on the web or since they bought a book or since they downloaded a track from iTunes or since they watched a video on YouTube or since they read a newspaper or magazine in their favorite web browser or....
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