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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (560726)	4/19/2010 12:08:12 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576186

a mini-Internet existed back then, you'd be a lot closer to having a point. And it did exist. The protocols we use didn't even exist until 1982. Some of them existed well before that in the early 70s. And again the protocols do not define the network. 100 years from now, we will (barring massive catastrophe) still have the internet, likely by the same name, but if they call it something else its still the world wide "network of networks". And it won't use IPv4, it might not even use TCP/IP anymore. (If I had to guess I think there's a good chance it will used some new version of our current protocols, but if it doesn't that would not mean the internet ceased to exist). And then there is the web. The creation of the web came later, and wasn't funded by Gore's initiatives. ------- In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee (Great Britain), an independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to an existing page. In 1984 Berners-Lee returned to CERN, and considered its problems of information presentation: physicists from around the world needed to share data, and with no common machines and no common presentation software. He wrote a proposal in March 1989 for "a large hypertext database with typed links", but it generated little interest. His boss, Mike Sendall, encouraged Berners-Lee to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation. He considered several names, including Information Mesh, The Information Mine (turned down as it abbreviates to TIM, the WWW's creator's name) or Mine of Information (turned down because it abbreviates to MOI which is "Me" in French), but settled on World Wide Web[1]. He found an enthusiastic collaborator in Robert Cailliau, who rewrote the proposal (published on November 12, 1990) and sought resources within CERN. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched their ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate their vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9 , the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was also a Web editor), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server (http://info.cern.ch ), and the first Web pages that described the project itself. The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well. However, it could run only on the NeXT; Nicola Pellow therefore created a simple text browser that could run on almost any computer. To encourage use within CERN, they put the CERN telephone directory on the web — previously users had had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers. Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited CERN in September 1991, and was captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to SLAC, where librarian Louise Addis adapted it for the VM/CMS operating system on the IBM mainframe as a way to display SLAC’s catalog of online documents; this was the first web server outside of Europe and the first in North America[2]. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet... en.wikipedia.org -------- And yes Mosaic was developed by the the National Center for Supercomputing Applications with funding by the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative which Gore did push. But that's not the invention of the web, let alone the development of the internet. Its the first widely used browser software. Beyond not being the Internet, or even the web, its not even the first browser software. It is the first widely supported graphical browser, but if it hadn't existed someone else would likely have developed something to do its job. Without it, the Internet was Usenet, Archie, gopher and email. Which wouldn't make it something other than the Internet. It is pretty clear that if it hadn't of been for Gore and his concept of the 'infohighway', we would have had a patchwork of private systems on the Compuserve model, with little or no interoperability. Its not even remotely clear. He didn't invent the concept, and the primary force behind it spreading wasn't Al Gore's pushing the idea.