In an exclusive interview, creator of the World-Wide Web Tim
Berners-Lee tells Roisin Woolnough where it is all going.
His parents met while working on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first
computer to be sold commercially. His mother became known as the
"first commercial computer programmer" after accompanying the
Ferranti to its installation site. But this all pales in comparison
to the legacy left by the man in question - Tim Berners-Lee, the
founder of the World-Wide Web.
With parents who were so actively involved in computing, it is
no real surprise that Berners-Lee, now 45, also went into this
field. "Around the house, it was very clear that maths was exciting
and fun," he says. "The curious properties of things were a source
of delight and definitely not boring."
Berners-Lee built his first computer while studying physics at
Oxford University, using a soldering iron, TTL
(transistor-transistor gates), a M6800 processor and an old
television. After university, he spent several years working in the
IT industry, but it wasn't until 1980, when he embarked upon a
six-month stint as a software consultant at Cern, the European
Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland, that he began the work
that was to eventually lead to the Web.
It all started with a Web-like program called Enquire - Enquire
Within Upon Everything - which stored information by using random
associations. Berners-Lee would type in information and each page
was a node in the program. To make a new node, he would have to
make a link from the old node. One of the advantages of Enquire was
that it stored information without using structures like matrices
or trees.
Berners-Lee wrote Enquire simply for the purpose of logging and
remembering all the people, computers and projects at Cern.
Unfortunately, when his six months was up he left the entire
Enquire source code, which was written in Pascal, with a systems
manager at Cern and it was lost.
However, the whole process of inventing the program and seeing
the results started Berners-Lee thinking about whether all
computers could be linked up and information shared. Once this
thought had lodged in his mind, there was no shifting it and he
became increasingly frustrated by what he saw as the unnecessary
incompatibility of computers.
Berners-Lee's vision was to decentralise computers - or
generalise them, as he calls it. When the Internet was formed in
the 1970s, it was used by a very small community and for specific
purposes. It took the arrival of the Web, made available to the
general public in 1991, for the Net to become a universal
phenomenon.
A lot of people cannot conceive of the Internet and the Web as
two different entities. The Net is basically a network of networks,
a series of cables between computers that enable various
applications, such as e-mail, to run. The Web, however, is more
abstract - a source of information, with the connections being
hypertext links.
"Before the Web there was the Internet and there were computers
all over the place," explains Berners-Lee. "But they were all
incompatible and you needed different hardware to get at them, and
sometimes different software. There were huge barriers to getting
at information. In fact, you had to be a technological whizz on the
Internet and at using a particular computer and system. For
example, if you went to a library to use a machine, you had to
learn the particular program that that library used."
The Internet and hypertext really took off around the time when
Berners-Lee's time at Cern was up, and it was his mission to join
the two together to form this worldwide connection. But it wasn't
until he was back at Cern in 1984 that he got the chance.
Berners-Lee's mind was focused on scaling up the idea of Enquire
into a global system. To do this, he wanted to combine Enquire's
external links with hypertext and interconnective elements of a
remote procedure call program he had devised to enable
communication between all the Cern computers and networks.
Then, in 1990, he got his hands on Steve Jobs' new PC, the NeXT,
and finally, he could start putting his hypertext ideas into
action. One of his first priorities was to give the project a name.
Mine of Information was one idea, but the acronym MOI is, of
course, French for "me", and therefore looked far too egocentric
for Berners-Lee's liking. Similarly. another possibility, The
Information Mine, which had the acronym TIM, was even more
distasteful to him. He then hit upon the World-Wide Web, a name
which expressed his global, decentralised vision.
Berners-Lee's main problem was not creating the Web, devising
all the links and mark-up languages, it was persuading Cern and the
world at large of the Web's potential. "People were very sceptical
and it felt like there were so many mountains to move," says
Berners-Lee. Once it was discovered by the general public in 1993
though, it grew exponentially.
Had Berners-Lee not been the one to invent the Web, he thinks it
would still have happened, but that it would have been a very
different phenomenon. "Someone would have got at the Web via a
different route, but it would have been taken up by a publisher and
it would have been a proprietary system. You would only be
published by going to a mammoth organisation and asking for some
space and it would have agreed a certain consistency. I don't think
it would have taken off so well."
Berners-Lee is still hugely active in directing the Web. In
1994, he joined the Laboratory for Computer Science at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, and he also became
the director of the World-Wide Web Consortium, a forum of
organisations which oversee the Web's development. In fact, he is
so excited by where the Web is now going, that he is getting his
hands dirty again. "It has got me writing code again."
He believes the next big thing will be the semantic Web, when
machines can analyse the information online. It is the idea that
computer programs will help humans to organise their lives and act
as intelligent agents. In creating this semantic Web, new
technologies are emerging. The big one, according to Berners-Lee,
is Resource Description Framework.
- Berners-Lee has recently written a book detailing how he
created the Web and his vision for its future, called Weaving the
Web. The World Wide Web Consortium can be found at
w3.org.