Much of the success of the internet has been down to a simple
desire to agree standards, experts behind the development of the
World Wide Web, said today.
Tim Berners-Lee, the web's inventor, along with a panel of
alumni at the Cern research centre in Geneva, revealed that the web
almost happened by accident.
Much of the web's success has been down to a simple desire to
develop web technology to run on any operating system, any
hardware, any language.
Ben Segal, Cern mentor, says the path to the day Berners-Lee
presented his vision of the World Wide Web, was littered with
political wrangling and the limitations Cern put on computer
science.
The journey started in 1980 when the particle physics research
centre, started using Unix and an e-mail system, C programming and
Usenet. It began a project to give researchers access to Unix
workstations in 1983, based on Apollo hardware and began testing
TCP/IP in 1983.
Six years later, researchers smuggled in a Next Cube
workstation, the Unix system made by Steve Jobs' Next Computer
company. Berners-Lee used this hardware, which was ahead of its
time with advanced software tools and the NextStep Unix operating
system user interface, to build the first version of the web.
These technologies combined together with Berners Lee's idea of
using simple version of the Standard Generalized Markup Language
called HTML, HTTP server software and a universal resource locator
(URL) to build Cern a document access system that would later
become the World Wide Web.
Apart from the Next hardware, none of this technology was
state-of-the art. "We had to keep it simple." said Berners-Lee. But
he says, "It was an accident it happened. Mike Sendall [my manager]
didn't give me the go-ahead for the web, but he allowed me to buy a
Next machine."
There were other roadblocks that Berners-Lee and the web team at
Cern somehow overcame. Ownership of the intellectual property was a
major issue. Robert Caillon, one of the first web converts, was
largely behind making sure Cern made the web public domain, so that
anyone could make a web site or a web browser.
Going forward, Berners-Lee predicts that the web will become
more data centric. Every website uses a different data format, but
he says, "People want to break down the silos of all the different
web sites by using linked data.
"There's a lot of data out there in a standard formation. For
instance we can ask the government to put the data on the net, so
when the information is updated, we can get access to it
easily."
Collaborative data is another example of where linked open data
can be used. Berners-Lee says, "It's the
OpenStreetMap model. So
if there's an error you can use a wiki to go in and fix it."
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