A very interresting set of radio show on BBC about the creation of CERN; CERN happens to be also the place where World Wide Web has been invented, incidentally when one of the laboratory needed to access informations dispatched on many different computers – from then Gopher quickly got replaced. History will ever remember Sir Tim Berners Lee. It quickly has been legally declared Public Domain – CERN could then not claim ownership but nobody else either.
There’s a very nice part of it which summarize quite perfectly the generosity behind the open source, and its root one can still find in the Science community.
I quite love this quote: Francis Farley
This [the Internet] usefull thing was a totally unexpected byproduct; you cannot plan the usefull part of science. What you can only do is to support the right guys let them do what they think is important – and out of that will come usefull applications
* thanks to Dodeckahedron for pointing out to me that today (10th september 2008) was the frist beam at CERN.
** picture: The Globe of Innovation in the morning. The wooden globe is a structure originally built for Switzerland’s national exhibition, Expo’02, and is 40 meters wide, 27 meters tall. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN) via BostonGlobe.
The first announcement about the World Wide Web has been posted on a newsgroup: alt.hypertext and can be found here.
WWW is an hypertext system. Wikipedia cites the other attempt at building hypertext systems:
The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older projects from the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University— among others Ted Nelson and Andries van Dam— Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart’s oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush’s microfilm-based “memex,” which was described in the 1945 essay “As We May Think”. (cit.)
One of the core advantage of WWW was to marry effectively its own hypertext system with the Internet.
Comment by admin — September 11, 2008 @ 3:05 am