Tim Berners-Lee's Original Announcement (1991)

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.announce/browse_thread/thread/6af5808c84a771fc/042c02b1b5992dd3?pli=1

by peterb • 14 years ago

184 35 14 years ago

groups.google.com

stroboskop• 14 years ago

This turned out to be a historic announcement. Note that the release was in source and binary form. The liberal copyright policy wisely chosen by Tim Berners-Lee was an important reason for the WWW's success.

In contrast, this post again reminds me that the Usenet-archives are now owned by Google. Are they also available anywhere else? Like the WWW they are part of the world's cultural heritage. It's good that the archives are accessible, but they shouldn't be proprietary.

yock• 14 years ago

Some entity must commit funds to storing and keeping those archives available. I understand your concern, but no one company or government is more or less likely to do something folish with those archives than any other.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

Google owns the most extensive archives of usenet because it has put in the effort. There's no reason that anyone else couldn't have done the same, they just failed to do so. Google acquired dejanews, an old usenet archival site, and they sought out personal archives as well to expand the collection. We should be happy that they have done anything, the more likely outcome was for no comprehensive archive ever to have been made.

zbowling3• 14 years ago

No, it's because they bought the company, Deja, that was responsible for putting the first widespread web interface on Usenet. Google groups used to be just Usenet until it forked into something different (user lists). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News

jetti• 14 years ago

"The liberal copyright policy wisely chosen by Tim Berners-Lee was an important reason for the WWW's success."

While Berners-Lee may have had a say in the matter, I think the credit goes to CERN for that one as they are the copyright holder:

"The code is not strictly public domain: it is copyright CERN (see copyright notice is in the .tar), but is free to collaborating institutes."

Still, there is no doubting that the liberal licensing helped WWW's success.

jgeralnik• 14 years ago

  However, it could start a revolution in information access

I'll say...

zbowling3• 14 years ago

  > However, it could start a revolution in information access.

They had no idea.

MatthewPhillips2• 14 years ago

Actually, that the thought entered his mind at all is quite prescient.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

Start a revolution in information access, and speed the process of real world revolution. Happy Birthday WWW indeed.

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

Perhaps one day we'll look back at the 20th century as the century of the Ws: WWI, WWII, WWW.

tribeofone• 14 years ago

I've read this memo dozens of times, and I never get tired of reading that line.

jballanc• 14 years ago

Reminds me of "the most famous understatement in history" from the original Watson & Crick paper:

    > It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing
      we have postulated immediately suggests a possible
      copying mechanism for the genetic material.

Create2• 14 years ago

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/photo51/

They were literally jerks. Franklin's work hasn't escaped them either. He isn't even denying the misappropriation, after all, that is what a physicist does by his definition (take other people's data ...work):

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1380325

just for the record and to please the prospective downvoting mob, here are my experimental observations consistent with the cern experimental domain in order to warn any non-westerners:

"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

Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines. What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was quite graphical programming, and not world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around -- certainly not western equivalents.

Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. world-wide. Nobody was astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic. They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given away without charge. WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of.

CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Veltman if you feel to downvote this because of CERN.

adamt• 14 years ago

Or how about - “One day there will be a telephone in every major city in the USA” – Alexander Graham Bell, c.1880.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

21 years to go from science lab side-project to the foundation of many of the largest multi-billion dollar companies in history and the glue to a worldwide communication network right out of science fiction. What will the next 21 years bring?

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

On the cautionary side, look at where many of those science labs are going -- in the U.S., for example. Increasingly dependent upon corporate funding and so, more or less, under the corporate thumb.

I'm not saying it's inevitable, but it's a warning sign for the Net, as well.

nixarn• 14 years ago

But it was on August 6? Right?

flashmob• 14 years ago

Actually, the earliest mention is here: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6487%40cernvax.cern.ch

Other famous usenet posts: http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html

fl3tch• 14 years ago

You know what's interesting? The immediate follow up to that first message, by Richard Chimera, mentions Randy Pausch. Does anybody remember him?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Small world.

aj700• 14 years ago

I take nothing away from what he did and I'm one of those people who dislike it when some people belittle what he did. He did the browser and the protocol and the url scheme. The excellence of NeXTSTEP helped. I only recently learned that a lot of the design of html, in terms of deciding how to fit sgml to markup the "Web" was also Dave Raggett. So people who say TBL "copied" SGML are wrong in two ways. There was also Calliau. Then all the other html "tags" that came afterwards, with NSCA Mosaic and Netscape and then W3C additions. Andreessen famously suggesting img etc. But TBL joined html with what else it needed to take over.

chimeracoder2• 14 years ago

I haven't seen anyone link to it yet, so here is that first server (magnet link): https://gist.github.com/3404362

There was a Reddit effort to recover it some months back, as it was believed to be lost. (It's now on the w3.org page, but IIRC, either it wasn't then, or it's a slightly later version published there).

http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/q4e57/help_save_the...

deno• 14 years ago

Link to a link? :)

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:30cf16d23446f98217c67b3b8840fbdb21ba1c9e

chimeracoder2• 14 years ago

Haha, thanks for the catch - I just copied that directly from a tweet. I couldn't tweet a magnet link (too long, and not supported by bit.ly) - hence the gist.

Anyway, please feel free to download this piece of history!

nsxwolf• 14 years ago

The Web is now old enough to drink! Let's buy the Web a drink.

eclipxe• 14 years ago

Today's version:

Show HN: My weekend project, WorldWideWeb (5 days from funding, Kickstarter details in comments!)

Zarathust• 14 years ago

I just read that and thought "meh...". I wonder how many such invention I pass everyday

27182818284• 14 years ago

In all fairness it was meh at its release. It didn't even support images.

ta12121• 14 years ago

OK, but why? I mean, who here hasn't seen this or know about it?

smokestack• 14 years ago

Yesterday was its 11th anniversary if for no other reason.

Tim Berners-Lee's Original Announcement (1991)

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