Sir Tim Berners-Lee Stars in Olympic Opening Ceremony

http://www.zdnet.com/uk/sir-tim-berners-lee-stars-in-olympics-opening-ceremony-7000001744/

by avolcano • 14 years ago

160 90 14 years ago

Posibyte• 14 years ago

This absolutely had my inner geek exploding in giddiness. It was one thing for the London Olympics to recognize him as a key part of the modern era, but to also place the (same model?) NeXT Cube next to him just topped it off. This made it memorable for me.

arethuza• 14 years ago

I realised that the whole event was probably going to be interesting when they had an engineer reading Shakespeare at the start.

NB My personal favourite was the NHS/GOSH/kids-fiction section.

djhworld2• 14 years ago

Tim sent this tweet https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/228960085672599552

pretty much right at the moment he was revealed, sadly it wasn't from the computer he was using (it was from his iPhone) but a nice touch!

ralfd2• 14 years ago

Also a wonder of the modern world: He got phone reception in that heavily crowded stadium.

gaius3• 14 years ago

It should have been an Acorn Archimedes, at CERN all those years ago.

atomicdog4• 14 years ago

They used Archimedes at CERN? Truly one of the greatest computers of all time.

larrywright• 14 years ago

The actual computer he used to create the web was a Next Cube, so that was more historically accurate.

djhworld2• 14 years ago

It made me very, very happy to see Tim there.

A lot of the media in the UK is very populist and anti-intellectual, celebrating questionable people (pop stars et al.) for their less than desirable achievements.

So it was good to see Tim being given such a platform celebrating his input into the world.

betageek• 14 years ago

I don't think that's just a UK problem...

atomicdog4• 14 years ago

That's why Danny Boyle did such a good job. If the British media had been in charge of the ceremony in could have very easily been a cringeworthy ordeal featuring a cast of z-list celebrities dancing about. The inclusion of Tim Berners-Lee and the NHS section were excellent ideas.

atomicdog4• 14 years ago

Excellent attention to detail by Danny Boyle. They could have had him on any old PC and 90% of the audience wouldn't have noticed.

http://i.imgur.com/bthc3.jpg

jmj422• 14 years ago

I noticed that too. As the house was lifting, I pointed out that the computer should be a next cube. If not, they did it wrong.

cantbecool• 14 years ago

When I saw a NeXTCube by his side, I knew this was going to be a memorable ceremony.

ditoa• 14 years ago

I was really happy to see the attention to detail having the NeXTCube :)

sgt3• 14 years ago

Me too, honestly I'm more interested in watching the NeXTCube than watching the rest of the Olympics.

derleth7• 14 years ago

So, is the British media claiming TimBL (and, by extension, the UK) invented the Internet?

jonhendry7• 14 years ago

Um, no, he invented the web.

derleth7• 14 years ago

> Um, no, he invented the web.

I know that. It seems fewer and fewer others do.

Also, condescension works incredibly badly when you clearly did not read what you were responding to.

aprendo2• 14 years ago

No, the subtitle said pretty clearly that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. I think confusing that with the Internet has nothing to do with the UK boosting their role in popularizing the Internet (since media outlets all over the world get it wrong all the time) and everything with many people not understanding the Internet.

youngtaff• 14 years ago

To most people the web is the internet, it's only us geeks who know the difference

jopt• 14 years ago

To some extent. While things like e-mail are getting harder for non-experts to distinguish from web content, I think many kids understand that World of Warcraft isn't the web.

epo• 14 years ago

No, the web. The Internet is something different. one would hope you knew at least that much before attempting to post on this site.

Create7• 14 years ago

fitting the scence: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19021660

Long PR story short: RPC was prevalent, that is how you control(led) your stuff remotely. Like Tim. Today, if you'd ask for a NeXT-like toy, you'd be denied were you an average Eastern. But western equivalent asked for it and got one, and put the gopher link address ptr in the reserved field of the text font properties (where things like bold and italics properties are stored) and voilà. You can also hire a cheap student to actually write the web client to be cross platform (its true virtue/value). Thanks to Nicola Pellow, of whom almost nobody knows about. Not to mention Groff, doing his compulsory civil service. Would the "web" have just run on NeXT, it would be long extinct, let alone take off.

On linking and hypertext: all post-war era stuff is spin. The real stuff comes from Belgium:

For ADD-ers: http://youtu.be/qwRN5m64I7Y

The story: http://www.archive.org/details/paulotlet

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/forgotten_forefather_paul...

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343?ln=en

The answer is a nice PR story on the web -- https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spin_%28publi...

On values at CERN, as a warning for non-western members:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y)" [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264

Aqwis2• 14 years ago

I don't even know what you're trying to say. That TBL is a fraud? Why so bitter?

Create7• 14 years ago

Having single-handedly invented WWW is a nonsense, put a failed physicist aside reinventing himself. Not to mention [S]GML, the stuff wired though using RPC. Claiming credit for other's hard work and even visions without attribution is even worse, especially in science ("Institute for Web Science"? wtf). There have been lots of prior art graphical networked markup hypertext systems, ie. Xerox, Walker's Symbolics Document Examiner etc. Having used the interface builder to dump the stuff coming from the network?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A#t=23m15s

I am bitter because of the manipulative sociopaths abusing their position and power.

aprendo2• 14 years ago

What do you want to say with the last four paragraphs? That's value as in monetary value, i.e. about the costs of the calorimeter system described in the report, taking into account labor costs in different countries. It has nothing to do with the other meaning of value, i.e. how the contributions of "non-western members" are valued.

Racism is still pervasive in western countries, so it's certainly possible – my guess is likely – that it plays some role even at CERN, but what you are quoting there is no evidence for racism. That's an absurd interpretation.

Create7• 14 years ago

Do not think, that value as in monetary value just stays in a spreadsheet cell at HR. The evaluation has consequences in all other evaluations, peer evaluations etc. It does contribute to the evaluation of contributions (ie. CHEP).

Myself should be enough evidence. Hence my bitterness.

kevingadd• 14 years ago

I've reread this post three times and it's still complete gibberish to me. Can someone explain it?

rwmj• 14 years ago

'Create' is a crank is probably the simplest explanation.

Create7• 14 years ago

Mr Bean made an appearance as a keyboard player at the London 2012 opening ceremony.

wisty• 14 years ago

Why you are getting downvoted:

Everyone here knows (or should know) that the internet started in the 60s (kinda, 1986 definitely), and WWW was a short project in 1989-1990 by TimBL, which just happened to catch on like wildfire (due to bandwidth increases, and cheap PCs more than anything else).

Tim Berners-Lee invented the first cut of HTTP (GET / POST etc), and got the ball rolling on HTML (which was basically a clone of the 1960s SGML).

Paul Otlet seems to have been something of a visionary (just like Ted Nelson, Project Xanadu's head).

TimBL was just in the right place, at the right time.

But it's silly to say that his only contribution was a few months writing WWW. He also wrote ENQUIRE 10 years before, which was kind of like Apple's HyperCard (1987 - between ENQUIRE and WWW).

There were lots of other Hypertext systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Implementations). But that doesn't mean TimBL was a fraud, simply that the media loves to simplify this kind of thing.

Create7• 14 years ago

I am being downvoted, because my assertions (admittedly in unpolished form) aren't backed by popular views (some of which are polished products, Manufacturing Consent) and because I stick to my guns and do my best to warn others about some things that are (not) supposed to happen especially at CERN.

simply that the media loves to simplify this kind of thing.

The media (and the beeb, almost openly since Dr. Kelly) does what it has been "ordered" to do, ie. "maximising opportunity and minimising threat":

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343

ps: Enquire was a Gutenberg project alike of a book (read digital form), which is admitted by TimBL. But you are right: information systems existed for a long time, and presumably will for a long time.

derleth7• 14 years ago

> the internet started in the 60s (kinda, 1986 definitely)

There are three years you can reasonably point to:

1969 was when the ARPANET project was founded by the DoD. This is the kitchen-sink-historian viewpoint: The ARPANET was the first packet-switched network and was certainly the ancestor of the Internet, but very little specific has carried over into the modern day. The main innovation from this early was packet-switching, or dividing up the message into a lot of little packets that are all individually addressed and can each make their own way to their ultimate destination. This provides reliability, simplicity, and economy compared to the phone system.

1977 was when the first gateway was demonstrated: Specifically, it was the first TCP-based transmission between three dissimilar networks. This is the functionalist viewpoint: Both TCP and the heterogeneous network-of-networks concept are essential to the modern Internet. The network-of-networks concept (implemented by gateways) allows different physical networks to share the same data, for example phone lines and Ethernet cables and WiFi. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) guarantees reliable and in-order transmission of data over unreliable physical networks, mainly by resending packets that got lost. Once you have gateways and TCP, you have the modern Internet. http://www.computerhistory.org/press/30th-anniversary-intern...

1983 was when NCP was ditched for TCP/IP on the ARPANET. This is the most restrictive/pragmatic view: NCP was the underlying protocol suite/software used on the early experimental ARPANET, whereas the TCP/IP protocol suite (as implemented by a lot of different software) is what we use today. NCP was implemented by specialized hardware and would have been prohibitively expensive to replicate anywhere else, whereas the TCP/IP stack has been implemented multiple times for multiple kinds of hardware and on multiple OSes. TCP/IP allowed the Internet to take off.

Hobbs' Internet Timeline is interesting: http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

gsnedders• 14 years ago

Not quite actually refuting what you said: HTML was certainly based on SGML (the similarity is obvious!), but it never was an SGML application. It only became an SGML application in the spec a couple of years later at the impetuous of DanC — no major HTML consumer has ever used an SGML parser for HTML.

alinajaf• 14 years ago

I honestly thought this comment was generated using a markov chain. If it isn't, I suggest strongly that you work on your writing.

Create7• 14 years ago

Don't listen to (ie. read) me. This writing was never supposed to be an essay to argue for or against something. It is an almost raw braindump: just a set of links so you can do your own research and make up your mind on your own.

It isn't for pleasing anybody in eloquence, but to warn.

derleth7• 14 years ago

> Today, if you'd ask for a NeXT-like toy, you'd be denied were you an average Eastern

An average Eastern what? Very, very few people anywhere got a NeXT system.

> the gopher link address ptr

Gopher had its chance, but the University of Minnesota thought it would be reasonable to charge licensing fees. The WWW won for multiple reasons, and that was a big one early on.

You really need to do some research.

Create7• 14 years ago

Very, very few people anywhere got a NeXT system. ...and therefore has little relevance to something dispersed World Wide.

Thanks for your kind advice: I did my fair amount of "research"[1] and therefore had my fair share of TBL-s western colleagues too in the process, calendaring theory included.

You are right: WWW won for multiple reasons. First and foremost, they could afford to give it away for free, since it was produced by cheap disposable labour. And it also won, because of a change in legislation in the U.S.A., and those "analysts" who caught early wind of it wound up well (see Ferguson from Vermeer tech.: his book is also a nemesis to the Silicon Valley Tune). Even better, look into IB's story. The French lisper never got the real credit he deserves. Even Groff and BL have trouble remembering his name. You are picking on the wrong person.

[1] "what this thing called PhD actually is" -- http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir-comments.htm

wallawe• 14 years ago

Drugs are bad, mmk?

sgt3• 14 years ago

I didn't see the opening ceremony - and not the NeXTCube scene either. Is there a video on YouTube or somewhere else?

cfn• 14 years ago

You can watch the highlightd on the BBC if you have access: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19022259

sgt3• 14 years ago

Thanks for the link but it doesn't appear it's available to my country.

atomicdog4• 14 years ago

A picture here: http://i.imgur.com/bthc3.jpg

atworkatwork• 14 years ago

Ironic, isnt it, that this celebration of the open and free web is not avaliable for everyone because of licences, and that he at the same time send a message thru twitter, a centralized service. Even sent it from an iPhone, a device that hinders hacking it as much as possible.

But the trusty Pirate Bay have the warez you crave! http://thepiratebay.se/search/olympic*/0/3/0

gaius3• 14 years ago

IT angle: the Olympic budget was £2.4bn, this ballooned to £13bn, but surprisingly, it was delivered on time (unlike the project Accenture did for the NHS, £12bn and nothing delivered).

timthorn• 14 years ago

£12bn was spread across several integrators including BT, CSC and Fujitsu, and delivered many successful services - particularly the Spine and PACS. The whole programme failed to deliver on the original goals and cost way too much, but it wasn't a complete loss nor was that the fault of any one supplier.

pestaa• 14 years ago

Does anyone know why it would cost more than 5 times more than the original budget? And how did they manage to reallocate that much resources?

This being the 3rd Olympic event in London, I'm surprised the estimate was that much off.

gaius3• 14 years ago

The first, a combination of incompetence (e.g. forgetting they'd have to pay VAT) and corruption. The latter: by getting into debt, that now necessitates cuts to the very things being celebrated, e.g. the NHS.

We spend more on interest on government debt in the UK than we do on defence.

hazov• 14 years ago

Maybe it has something to do with cost overrun that professor Bent Flyvbjerg researches.

Basically he says that budget estimations are prone to a cognitive fallacy by those with planning powers.

EDIT: added "estimations"

simonw• 14 years ago

Last time London hosted the Olympics was post-war 1948, on a budget of less than a million pounds (I'm not sure if that figure is adjusted for modern currency or not, but either way it's not much money) - they didn't even build any new buildings for it.

yummyfajitas• 14 years ago

Most big projects of this nature come in over budget. The reason is the incentives of the politicians coming up with budget estimates.

If they come up with a realistic (high) estimate, the project doesn't get done. That's a political loss - their cronies don't get paid, and they don't get to put their name on a big project. If they come up with an unrealistically low estimate, their cronies get paid and they rarely get voted out of office.

dspillett• 14 years ago

I thought the total was only 9.3bn?

Though that is still massively not "in budget" (which, despite us knowing the figures and many of us being capable of basic arithmetic, some politicians still have the balls to try claim).

ralfd2• 14 years ago

Wow, what? How do you even spend 9.3 billion pounds? Did they hire a million people for 10K?

lclarkmichalek• 14 years ago

The industrial portion ceremony started with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, while the modern portion of the ceremony finished with Tim Berners-Lee. I definitely think that Danny Boyle was drawing a parallel between the two people, and it will be interesting to see if history does the same.

Someone2• 14 years ago

I do not see much of a parallel between the two. Brunel is known for zillions of physical objects, built over decades; TBL is known for only one thing, created in less than two years (probably not as his main project, I guess)

Also, Brunel must have been quite an organizer to get done what he got done; TBL created the web almost alone.

wseymour• 14 years ago

Both men applied their intellect to substantially improve the standard of living for the rest of mankind.

79522• 14 years ago

The parallel is their fame. Brunel didn't build the industrial world on his own any-more than TBL built the interweb on his own. Its just good to have heroes.

cdent• 14 years ago

His message was a nice warning for us all to work harder to keep the web a thing for people, all people, not corporations.

wangweij• 14 years ago

I guess that keyboard and the monitor are somehow wired to an iPhone.

cstross• 14 years ago

No credit to NBC, however, who apparently replaced a tribute to the victims of the 7/7 terrorist massacre with a talking head off American Idol, had no idea who Sir Tim was, and censored the first lesbian kiss ever seen on Saudi TV:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jul/28/london-2012-nbc-...

jmj422• 14 years ago

yeah, I thought NBC's coverage was horrible. Do they really believe that the majority of the world actually needs _all_ of the imagery explained? I mean, who doesn't know who that lady on the umbrella, flying out of the sky is (for example)?

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

> I mean, who doesn't know who that lady on the umbrella, flying out of the sky is (for example)?

I actually wonder how many people under 20 know this.

cup• 14 years ago

A big Satellite TV distributor once accidently transmitted Italian pornography onto the sets of Saudi Televisions, so I doubt it was the first lesbian kiss seen on TV.

raldi• 14 years ago

Is there any way for me to watch the "This is for everyone" moment on the Internet, or is it not for me?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Stars in Olympic Opening Ceremony

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