i found How the Web Was Born, by James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, on the shelves at work. It’s a scholarly, but not too dry, history of the World Wide Web, and the precedents which set the stage for its emanation from CERN in the early 1990s.
The book was written in 2000, and one of the authors (Cailliau) played a leading role in the birth of the web, although I’ll freely admit I had never heard his name before. I’ve been online since 1991, erratically at first, but almost every day since mid-1993. I recognized several of the names, and there is a very useful 10 page list of “The Cast” as an index.
Tim Berners-Lee gets lead credit for the web, but the book gives a much broader picture of the historical precedents and the individuals who over decades contributed ideas and technology to set the stage for TBL. I knew about Minitel, for instance, but have you ever heard of Cyclades, another network from France in 1972? I had not, but it’s clear that European support for X.25 (a competing network standard from telcos) killed the enthusiasm (and funding) for this early packet-switched network. I think the human factors of technology adoption — which include political and organizational structures — are almost as interesting as the technical leaps. Maybe that’s because the human element slows the rate of change down to where it can be recognized while it’s in progress.
The final pages of the book, about the political/organizational reasons why Tim Berners-Lee followed the center of internet gravity to the United States when founding the W3C, came as a striking coincidence to my reading “The Big Picture,” from Mahashunyam over at Bubble Generation this weekend. Timing is a total coincidence, but six years on, the European management of innovation is still troubled.
This makes me think that Europe, on the whole, appears to be unprepared for the age of the Knowledge Worker who is a co-creator of wealth although there are a few pockets of innovation in certain industries such as mobile communications and software. But, the model is very different : it’s either dumb and risk-averse Big Government money or it’s led by R&D labs in large corporations such as Nokia. On the whole, Europe seems to be less capable of creating innovation clusters in new industries by grass-roots entrepreneurship and a whole lot of energetic start-ups.
Other notes
Even Tim Berners-Lee thought about “tags,” it seems. Another useful reminder that folksonomies are not new. In 1980, during TBL’s first stint at CERN, he wrote a program called Enquire which encouraged individual arbitrary assignments of topics.
‘Enquire,’ said the help file significantly, ‘allows information to be structured in any arbitrary way. It does not have to be forced into a tree structure or set of tables.’ That feature made Enquire good at describing random associations. … Enquire’s lack of heirarchical structure, Tim believed, could lead a use ‘to information which he did not realize he needed to know’. [p. 170]
The main problem Tim had with heirarchical information systems was that they placed restraints on the information itself. ‘This is why a “web” of notes with links between them is far more useful than a fixed heirarchical system,’ he claimed. [p. 182]
‘The usual problem with keywords,’ Tim pointed out, ‘is that two people never choose the same keywords.’ And while people may recognize similarities in meaning between words, computers do not. A person wishing to buy a yellow car in Massachusetts, for example, would recognize that a primrose Ford in Boston matched his needs, but a computer would not equate primrose with yellow or Boston with Massachusetts.
Digital already had a solution to the keyword problem for its VAX NOTES system. That required keywords to be registered so that there would only be a restricted list to choose from. That was fine as far as it went, but a little impractical for a widely distributed system such as Tim envisioned. His conceptual solution was to define ‘circles’ as keywords and point them to any other documents to which they were relevant. The difficulties of implementing this idea in practice were still troubling Web developers a decade later. [p.183]
For a more modern take, check the notes on a tagging panel at SXSW 2006.
Separately, the unwieldy “dub-dub-dub” abbreviation was recognized as a problem even by its namers.
‘World Wide Web,’ said Tim. ‘We can’t call it that,’ replied Robert [Cailliau], ‘because the abbreviation WWW sounds longer than the full name!’ [p. 199]
But they pressed on. And I know I’m willing to cut them some slack on this one. I’ll bet you are, too.