They're at it again...

George Herbert gherbert at crl.com
Sat Mar 13 03:00:55 UTC 1999


Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> writes:
>>> Now that all these folks have laid claim to inventing the Internet,
>>> I wonder who will take the credit (blame?) for inventing the web?
>> Berners-Lee ??
>
>indeed, tbl deserves much credit for html and the client/server model and
>implementation.
>
>but hypertext, links, etc. were described by vanevar busch (sp?) in 1948.
>undoubtedly the sociopaths of the time excoriated him for it.

...and were already in use in gopher and archie, though not to
the same ease of use and multimedia expandability, at the time tbl
did html/http.  I spent a couple of years thinking html wasn't
really going to be much of an improvement; it took until I saw
a running Mosaic to really see it sink in.  In a way, Andreesen
and the rest of the uiuc mosaic team deserve a good chunk of
the "web" implimentation credit.

>From what I can tell, most of what the Web is (and a lot more)
were prototyped and/or predicted in Xanadu, which never took
flight but seems to have inspired a lot of people towards thinking
about things that became the web.  So perhaps a bit of credit to
Nelson and the others there, though they really established the
standard in vaporware...

#insert <stdcollaborationwasgoodthingfornet.h>


-george william herbert
gherbert at crl.com





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