HAPPY BIRTHDAY WORLDWIDE (and yes you CAN thank Al Gore!)

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Centerleftfl

Verified User
HAPPY BIRTHDAY to The WORLDWIDE WEB (and yes you CAN thank Al Gore!)

I had absolutely no idea what the hell it was. I hadn't even heard of it until maybe 92. Then I read where 'Algore' was sending TIPPER, who was an amateur photographer, to take pictures half way around the world. It didn't remember it was INDIA till I saw this article. She took pictures of a bunch of people sitting at terminals 'throwing the switch' so to speak. "Going worldwide." That was APRIL 1993. It wasn't even a big article. The rest, as they say is history. We all know it started as a system used by scientists, universities and the military.

Apparently in 1989 a guy at the CERN proposed a plan, "Information Management: A proposal" and handed it to his boss. He was told to flesh it out. Suffice to say it ended up being a whooole lot more.

Google DOODLES box is featuring it's 30 yr. anniversary today.

Good article but it won't allow me to C&P anything bUT the 'address'...


Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...ofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
 
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Havana Moon said:
This idiot has never heard of Tim Berners-Lee, not surprising really!!
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Tim Berners-Lee is another piece of a puzzle that makes it clear how ironic it is that so many "tech bros" these days revel in the Internet as a kind of libertarian dream. The reality is, the Internet as we know it was shepherded by government for decades, before the private sector took on a major role. It started at DARPA as the ARPANET, which was a government program. Then it expanded largely among government labs and state universities, in pre-web forms of Internet exchange. Politicians like Al Gore had a key role in helping that process. Then CERN, a governmental collective, developed HTML. It shows how important government can be in ushering in positive changes for mankind, especially when the eventual pay-offs are either too distant or too widely dispersed for the private sector to see a payday in laying down the groundwork.
 
Oneuli said:
Tim Berners-Lee is another piece of a puzzle that makes it clear how ironic it is that so many "tech bros" these days revel in the Internet as a kind of libertarian dream. The reality is, the Internet as we know it was shepherded by government for decades, before the private sector took on a major role. It started at DARPA as the ARPANET, which was a government program. Then it expanded largely among government labs and state universities, in pre-web forms of Internet exchange. Politicians like Al Gore had a key role in helping that process. Then CERN, a governmental collective, developed HTML. It shows how important government can be in ushering in positive changes for mankind, especially when the eventual pay-offs are either too distant or too widely dispersed for the private sector to see a payday in laying down the groundwork.
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Look missy, I worked in IT and datacomms for over 30 years and don't need any lectures from you, thanks all the same. I might also point that it was when good old Ma Bell divested and Unix became a supported product that datacomms, especially packet switching and TCP/IP really took off. I still have a dog eared copy of Kernighan and Richie's C Programming Language.
 
Havana Moon said:
Look missy, I worked in IT and datacomms for over 30 years and don't need any lectures from you, thanks all the same. I might also point that it was when good old Ma Bell divested and Unix became a supported product that datacomms, especially packet switching and TCP/IP really took off. I still have a dog eared copy of Kernighan and Richie's C Programming Language.
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CERN did not develop HTML, it was a private initiative by Berners-Lee. If he has charged a licence fee then he'd have been a squillionaire by now. I attended a lecture by him back in the late 90s, truly an amazing man.
 
Havana Moon said:
CERN did not develop HTML, it was a private initiative by Berners-Lee. If he has charged a licence fee then he'd have been a squillionaire by now. I attended a lecture by him back in the late 90s, truly an amazing man.
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He was a contractor at Cern when he came up with it. It was designed to connect scientists from around the world with the Cern data and to communicate ideas.
 
Nordberg said:
He was a contractor at Cern when he came up with it. It was designed to connect scientists from around the world with the Cern data and to communicate ideas.
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I know all that, what do think he talked about at the lecture I attended? He came up with the idea himself whilst working at CERN to.majwhis life and those of his fellow boffins easier.
 
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Centerleftfl said:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY to The WORLDWIDE WEB (and yes you CAN thank Al Gore!)
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Oneuli said:
Tim Berners-Lee is another piece of a puzzle that makes it clear how ironic it is that so many "tech bros" these days revel in the Internet as a kind of libertarian dream. The reality is, the Internet as we know it was shepherded by government for decades, before the private sector took on a major role. It started at DARPA as the ARPANET, which was a government program. Then it expanded largely among government labs and state universities, in pre-web forms of Internet exchange. Politicians like Al Gore had a key role in helping that process. Then CERN, a governmental collective, developed HTML. It shows how important government can be in ushering in positive changes for mankind, especially when the eventual pay-offs are either too distant or too widely dispersed for the private sector to see a payday in laying down the groundwork.
Click to expand...

giphy.gif
 
Havana Moon said:
This idiot has never heard of Tim Berners-Lee, not surprising really!!
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Oh just about everyone has of Tim Berners-Lee.....Having said that Al Gore was involved in supporting computer technology as a congressman when most of his colleagues could have cared less. He introduced the Supercomputer Study Act of 1986. He also introduced the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (aka The Gore Bill) which played a central role in developing ARPANET into the internet that we know today by providing $600 million for research and infrastructure development. In fact his role was considered central by Leonard Kleinrock, one of the creaters of the ARPANET, a fore runner to the internet.

So like it or not, and hate him or not, Al Gore played a central role in advancing computing and communications technologies in the late 80's and early 90's when most people in government were oblivious to its potential.
 
Oneuli said:
Tim Berners-Lee is another piece of a puzzle that makes it clear how ironic it is that so many "tech bros" these days revel in the Internet as a kind of libertarian dream. The reality is, the Internet as we know it was shepherded by government for decades, before the private sector took on a major role. It started at DARPA as the ARPANET, which was a government program. Then it expanded largely among government labs and state universities, in pre-web forms of Internet exchange. Politicians like Al Gore had a key role in helping that process. Then CERN, a governmental collective, developed HTML. It shows how important government can be in ushering in positive changes for mankind, especially when the eventual pay-offs are either too distant or too widely dispersed for the private sector to see a payday in laying down the groundwork.
Click to expand...
Yup. I was using usenet groups on DARPA and later ARPANET when I was in college in the early to mid 80's. There were essentially no private sector access to usenet groups at that time. However you are wrong on Tim Berners-Lee. He did invent HTML. Give credit where it's due (having said that Lee was employed by CERN when he invented HTML).
 
Tim Berners-Lee: 'Stop web's downward plunge to dysfunctional future'
11 March 2019


Global action is required to tackle the web's "downward plunge to a dysfunctional future", its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has told the BBC.

He made the comments in an exclusive interview to mark 30 years since he submitted his proposal for the web.

Sir Tim said people had realised how their data could be "manipulated" after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

However, he said he felt problems such as data breaches, hacking and misinformation could be tackled.

In an open letter also published on Monday, the web's creator acknowledged that many people doubted the web could be a force for good.

He had his own anxieties about the web's future, he told the BBC: "I'm very concerned about nastiness and misinformation spreading."

But he said he felt that people were beginning to better understand the risks they faced as web users.

"When the Cambridge Analytica thing went down [people] realised that elections had been manipulated using data that they contributed."

He added that in recent years he has increasingly felt that the principles of an open web need to be safeguarded.

In his letter, Sir Tim outlined three specific areas of "dysfunction" that he said were harming the web today:

malicious activity such as hacking and harassment
problematic system design such as business models that reward clickbait
unintended consequences, such as aggressive or polarised discussions

These things could be dealt with, in part, through new laws and systems that limit bad behaviour online, he said.

He cited the Contract for the Web project, which he helped to launch late last year.

But initiatives like this would require all of society to contribute - from members of the public to business and political leaders.

"We need open web champions within government - civil servants and elected officials who will take action when private sector interests threaten the public good and who will stand up to protect the open web," he wrote.

Wandering round the data centre at Cern, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was in a playful mood, remembering how he'd plugged the very first web server into the centre's uninterruptible power supply over Christmas so that nobody would switch it off - only for the whole place to be powered down.

But as we talked about what had happened since he submitted his proposal for the web 30 years ago - described by his boss as "vague but exciting" - Sir Tim's mood darkened. In the last few years, he told me, he'd realised it was not enough to just campaign for an open web and leave people to their own devices.

Sir Tim has a plan - the Contract for the Web - to put things back on the right track but it depends on governments and corporations doing their part, and the citizens of the web pressing them to act.

When, as my last question, I asked Sir Tim whether the overall impact of the web had been good, I expected an upbeat answer. Instead, gesturing to indicate an upward and then a downward curve, he said that after a good first 15 years, things had turned bad and a "mid-course correction" was needed.

His brilliant creation has grown into a troubled adolescent - and Sir Tim sees it as his personal mission to put the web back on the right track.

Sir Tim's vision was "at once utopian and realistic", said Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

It rested on the idea that a free and open web would empower its users, rather than reduce them to simply being consumers, he explained.

"I see Tim's letter not only as a call to build a better web, but to rededicate ourselves to the core principles it embodies," he told the BBC.

Those principles, he said, included universality of access and transparency - the ability to see and understand how web applications work.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47524474
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Yup. I was using usenet groups on DARPA and later ARPANET when I was in college in the early to mid 80's. There were essentially no private sector access to usenet groups at that time. However you are wrong on Tim Berners-Lee. He did invent HTML. Give credit where it's due (having said that Lee was employed by CERN when he invented HTML).
Click to expand...

That's the point I was making -- his work on HTML was at CERN and was responsive to needs of CERN. If he'd instead been employed at a private company, where open sharing of information across a broad global platform like that wasn't seen as having value, at the time, he wouldn't have done it.
 
Centerleftfl said:
I had absolutely no idea what the hell it was. I hadn't even heard of it until maybe 92. Then I read where 'Algore' was sending TIPPER, who was an amateur photographer, to take pictures half way around the world. It didn't remember it was INDIA till I saw this article. She took pictures of a bunch of people sitting at terminals 'throwing the switch' so to speak. "Going worldwide." That was APRIL 1993. It wasn't even a big article. The rest, as they say is history. We all know it started as a system used by scientists, universities and the military.

Apparently in 1989 a guy at the CERN proposed a plan, "Information Management: A proposal" and handed it to his boss. He was told to flesh it out. Suffice to say it ended up being a whooole lot more.

Google DOODLES box is featuring it's 30 yr. anniversary today.

Good article but it won't allow me to C&P anything by the 'address'...


Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...ofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
Click to expand...

Here is the definitive statement on Gore's involvement in the Internet, from the guys who really did invent it:

****************************************************************************
Al Gore and the Internet

By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
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http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt
 
Oneuli said:
That's the point I was making -- his work on HTML was at CERN and was responsive to needs of CERN. If he'd instead been employed at a private company, where open sharing of information across a broad global platform like that wasn't seen as having value, at the time, he wouldn't have done it.
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Oh sure it would have happened. It's just that instead of recognizing Mr. Lee some Pirate of Silicon Valley with a shit ton of patent Attorney's in his employ would have taken credit for the Berner-Lee's intellectual property he stole. LOL
 
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Mott the Hoople said:
Oh just about everyone has of Tim Berners-Lee.....Having said that Al Gore was involved in supporting computer technology as a congressman when most of his colleagues could have cared less. He introduced the Supercomputer Study Act of 1986. He also introduced the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (aka The Gore Bill) which played a central role in developing ARPANET into the internet that we know today by providing $600 million for research and infrastructure development. In fact his role was considered central by Leonard Kleinrock, one of the creaters of the ARPANET, a fore runner to the internet.

So like it or not, and hate him or not, Al Gore played a central role in advancing computing and communications technologies in the late 80's and early 90's when most people in government were oblivious to its potential.
Click to expand...

Well he hadn't or did you miss that?

I been involved in datacomms for over three decades with different companies and networking protocols. Have you heard of Bolt, Beranek and Newman aka BBN,Telenet, X.25, RIP, TCP/IP, OSPF, MPLS, IS-IS, BGP routing protocols and the seven layer OSI network model? Don't remember El Gordo having anything to do with any of those!
 
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