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| The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, Ch. 17 ~ by Dr. Peter Salus |
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Thursday, September 15 2005 @ 09:04 AM EDT
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Here is the next installment, Chapter 17 - "The Web", in our ongoing book by Dr. Peter Salus, The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin.
Here are the earlier installments:
Dr. Salus references Tim Berners-Lee's book, "Weaving the Web, The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web, by its inventor." If you would enjoy to read it, you can find a publisher in your language here. The blurb by the author begins like this: "This book is written to address the questions most people ask -- From 'What were you thinking when you invented it?' through 'So what do you think of it now?' to 'Where is this all going to take us?' -- this is the story."
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The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin
~ by Dr. Peter H. Salus
Chapter 17. The Web
Just what will inspire invention is infinitely
variable.
Ted Nelson says that his notion of hypertext
was inspired by Vannevar Bush's "As We May
Think"1 and by S.T. Coleridge's poem
"Kubla Khan" (1798, published in 1816).
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee says that in his
childhood home there was a book entitled
Enquire Within upon Everything, a "musty old
book of Victorian advice." What we now think of
as the Web, was originally called "Enquire."2
The son of two mathematicians, Tim Berners-Lee
took a degree in physics from Queens College Oxford
and then worked for Plessey Telecommunications and
D.G. Nash, prior to going to CERN as an independent
contractor in 1980.
At CERN, Berners-Lee felt a need for researchers to
locate and share information. Having read Ted Nelson's
work, he determined that hypertext was the appropriate
model to use. With the aid of Robert Cailliau, he
set out to build a prototype system -- Enquire. But
Berners-Lee left CERN at the end of 1980 to work for
Image Computing Systems.
In 1984, Berners-Lee returned to CERN as a fellow and
immediately went to work on CERN's Internet site, which
by 1989 was the largest single site in Europe. He jumped
at the opportunity of "marrying" the notion of hypertext
and the Internet.
In Chapter 5, I outlined Lesk's development of uucp (1976)
and the evolution of Netnews and the search engines (Gopher,
archie, WAIS). What Berners-Lee was creating was the
logical product of this decade's work by a variety of
people. "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect
it to the TCP and DNS ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World
Wide Web." 3
Berners-Lee envisaged knowledge as an immense reticulum,
and so he named his creation the World Wide Web. To
navigate within the Web, he designed and built the
first browser (WorldWideWeb) and developed (on NextStep).
The first server was called httpd (hyper text transfer
protocol daemon). The new proposal for this was written
on November 12, 1990; work was begun the next day. The
tools were written over Christmas holiday 1990-91. The
world learned about it on August 6, 1991, when Berners-Lee
posted a summary of his project on alt.hypertext.
The Web is an information space in which items of interest
("resources") are tagged with global identifiers (Uniform
Resource Identifiers [URIs]). The Web is not the Internet,
it is a service operating on the Internet.
And on April 3, 1993, CERN announced that the code would
be free, with no fee. This last was crucial, for the University
of Minnesota had succeeded in dashing the enthusiasm for
Gopher through the cold water of a fee.
The Internet was free. TCP/IP was free. UUCP was free.
Gopher had no chance. The World Wide Web now did.
I'm certain that Vannevar Bush had no notion of the
inspiration his 1945 article would provide: to Doug
Englebart and Ted Nelson; to Tim Berners-Lee; to innumerable
others. But what has been salient over these 60 years has
been the notion of building on the previous constructs,
which have been freely accessible.
Hypertext (in the sense most of us use it) has little to
do with what Ted Nelson wrote about in the late 1960s and
the 1970s. I asked Ted about the Web:
"Berners-Lee came to my office in 1992 and showed me
what he'd done," he told me. "I was polite, didn't say I
thought it was stupid, and took him to lunch. That was the
extent of our interaction."
He continued: "The web has nothing
whatsoever to do with my notion of hypertext, and I am still
fighting for what I believe in. Real Soon Now, I hope this month,
I'll be announcing a new spec called Transliterature. Watch for it.
"What would I have to do with http?"
But hypertext was Ted's concept. It has been refashioned into
something very different.
And I can't even buy a bar of soap that doesn't have a URL
on it.
1First published in The Atlantic,
January 1945
2Enquire Within... was one of the very
many Victorian compendia. It was originally
published in 1859 and went through over 100
printings and editions, the most recent of which
was published in New York in 1978.
3For a truly personal view of this history,
see Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (1999).
Dr. Salus is the author of "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (which you can obtain here, here, here and here) and several other books, including "HPL: Little Languages and Tools", "Big Book of Ipv6 Addressing Rfcs", "Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Imperative Programming Languages", "Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond", and "The Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Functional, Concurrent and Logic Programming Languages". There is an interview with him, audio and video,"codebytes: A History of UNIX and UNIX Licences" which was done in 2001 at a USENIX conference. Dr. Salus has served as Executive Director of the USENIX Association. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. To view
a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way,
Stanford, California 94305, USA.
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| Authored by: Griffin3 on Thursday, September 15 2005 @ 09:34 AM EDT |
| Because it's traditional. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: akoma on Thursday, September 15 2005 @ 10:06 AM EDT |
Imagine that Ted Nelson would have patented hypertext ? Where whould have been
the WWW right about now?
Software patent foster innovation my a..!!
---
I have no insightfull things to say in my sign..[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: MathFox on Thursday, September 15 2005 @ 10:32 AM EDT |
A thread to collect the misc. stuff.
Please provide a summary when you post a link (HTML mode).
---
When people start to comment on the form of a message, it is a sign that they
have problems to accept the truth of the message.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, September 15 2005 @ 10:44 AM EDT |
I was the one who asked about the series in the comments of one of yesterday's
articles. Great to see the series back.
I can certainly appreciate other things competing for your time. Thank you for
taking the time to write this book, and thank you for sharing it with us. It is
an excellent piece of work.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: dwheeler on Thursday, September 15 2005 @ 12:02 PM EDT |
| Ted Nelson is a visionary, and his ideas certainly inspired others. But if I
recall correctly, one of the key problems with Nelson's original vision was the
extreme effort he took in ensuring that everyone could be a tollkeeper. Look at
Nelson's work on "transclusion"; a work could incorporate other works
(transclusion), and his idea was to try to embed tollbooths everywhere for all
the pieces. As a result, his system was exceedingly complex. And as
things scaled, it got increasingly difficult to understand as a user, too, as
far as rights were concerned.
The world wide web is simple, because it does
not try to do micropayments. Instead, people just send out information
on request -- no figuring out who all the middlemen are, or embedding tollbooths
in every car.
Which makes things simple.
The same is true for the underlying
TCP/IP. AT&T was not interested in TCP/IP, in part because they couldn't
figure out how to charge for every packet. What they failed to realize was that
the auditing and chargeback infrastructure was so large, that it exceeded the
value gained by the chargeback infrastructure. By throwing out the massive
auditing infrastructure, and simply doing "best-effort", everything was
simplified so much that the resulting system actually outperformed its
competition and at lower cost.
Sometimes, the cost of trying to manage
payments (including the valuation as well as the exchange of goods and payment)
far exceeds the value of what is being exchanged. That's particuarly likely to
be true for small goods, or goods whose value is extremely difficult to
determine before receiving them. It's easy to argue that this is why open
source software development processes seem to work. It's difficult to value on a
patch. Sometimes, the cost of exchanging things exceeds the value of what's
being exchanged, so you either don't do it, or just give it away and don't worry
about it.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, September 15 2005 @ 12:59 PM EDT |
| Surely Charles Goldfarb also deserves credit for his SGML Standrd? [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, September 15 2005 @ 05:45 PM EDT |
Lets see. If a flaw in software lets someone have roiot access to my computer
and possible trash all my work files we call it a critical flaw. So what exactly
do we call a flaw that might permit a complete perversion of the democratic
process in an entire country. Hypercritical? Supercritical? How about
thermonuclear![ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, September 15 2005 @ 10:58 PM EDT |
1798? 1816? Hmmm ... that just might be old enough to be in the public
domain. ;-) Courtesy of a
search at Project
Gutenberg:
Kubla Khan
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately
pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns
measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile
ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens
bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And
here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a
cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning
moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm,
with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were
breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift
half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or
chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at
once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering
with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached
the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And
'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where
was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a
miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A
damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian
maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me.
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep
delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that
dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should
see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his
floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with
holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of
Paradise.
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere
at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it
away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with
this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 16 2005 @ 08:30 AM EDT |
Anyone else think this needs its own link on the left-hand menu?
I just bothered to read the prevous chapters, and wanted to note, that A/UX is
definitly one of the most "interesting" unicies Ive encounted. it is
quite a unique experence to use (I have a Apple quadra with it installed).
Oninoshiko[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, September 18 2005 @ 06:41 AM EDT |
| Proprietary software is going through a 'clagging up the commons' problem;
sort-of the reverse of the 'tragedy of the commons' that some think free
software will suffer from.
As more and more 'enslaved' software gets created,
the total resource available for people who want to buy licenses to use it
remains roughly constant. So you would think the price of a software license
would go down.
However, proprietary software owners tend not to like that;
particularly M$-types who are in positions of power. So they lobby for more
and more draconian laws to protect themseleves at the expense of
others.
IBM-types see this as natural evolution; OS/2 is copyright but has no
value ... costs more to maintain than it would being in in licensing revenue. So
it is put quietly to sleep.
IBM also cannot ship 'free' software, at least
other people's free software. The risk that it might inadvertantly contain
something subject to an increasingly-draconian law, when IBM is one of the few
organizations left in town who could pay, is just too great. It can't be taken.
IBM cannot even give the free stuff to charities and schools.
It's a tragedy.
IBM lends Novell $50M to buy SuSE. IBM buys GlueCode to turn it from
other people's GPL software to IBM GPL software, which it will take the risk of
shipping. IBM offers 100 employees to become maths/science teachers to
alleviate the 6 million person skill shortage that is about to hit town. IBM
tries.
But you have got to sort out the laws. Start with the anti-trust one.
Make it bite. [ Reply to This | # ]
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- OS/2 - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 19 2005 @ 11:51 PM EDT
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