flâneur

The World Wide Web: A very short personal history

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In response to a request, a one page looking back on the development of the Web from my point of view. Written 1998/05/07 There have always been things which people are good at, and things computers have been good at, and little overlap between the two. I was brought up to understand this distinction in the 50s and 60s and intuition and understanding were human characteristics, and that computers worked mechanically in tables and hierarchies. One of the things computers have not done for an organization is to be able to store random associations between disparate things, although this is something the brain has always done relatively well. In 1980 I played with programs to store information with random links, and in 1989, while working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory, I proposed that a global hypertext space be created in which any network-accessible information could be refered to by a single "Universal Document Identifier". Given the go-ahead to experiment by my boss, Mik

Tim Berners-Lee In response to a request, a one page looking back on the development of the Web from my point of view. Written 1998/05/07 There have always been things which people are good at, and things computers have been good at, and little overlap between the two. I was brought up to understand this distinction in the 50s and 60s and intuition and understanding were human characteristics, and that computers worked mechanically in tables and hierarchies. One of the things computers have not done for an organization is to be able to store random associations between disparate things,…

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