The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 108

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All of these elements, from Enquire Within to the brain’s ability to make random associations and to collaborate with others, were jangling around in Berners-Lee’s head when he graduated from Oxford. Later he would realize a truth about innovation: New ideas occur when a lot of random notions churn together until they coalesce. He described the process this way: “Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it’s better.”¹²

For Berners-Lee, his own innovative concepts began to coalesce when he took a consulting job at CERN, the mammoth supercollider and particle physics lab near Geneva. He needed a way to catalogue the connections among the ten thousand or so researchers, their projects, and their computer systems. Both the computers and the people spoke many different languages and tended to make ad hoc links to one another. Berners-Lee needed to keep track of them, so he wrote a program to help him do so. He noticed that when people explained to him the various relationships at CERN, they tended to scribble diagrams with a lot of arrows. So he devised a method to replicate these in his program. He would type in the name of a person or project and then create links that would show which were related. Thus it was that Berners-Lee created a computer program that he named, after the Victorian almanac of his childhood, Enquire.

“I liked Enquire,” he wrote, “because it stored information without using structures like matrices or trees.”¹³ Such structures are hierarchical and rigid, whereas the human mind makes more random leaps. As he worked on Enquire, he developed a grander vision for what it could become. “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked. There would be a single global information space. A web of information would form.”¹⁴ What he imagined, although he didn’t know it at the time, was Vannevar Bush’s memex machine—which could store documents, cross-reference them, retrieve them—writ global.

But before he got very far in creating Enquire, his consultancy at CERN came to an end. He left behind his computer and his eight-inch floppy disk containing all of the code, and it was promptly lost and forgotten. For a few years he worked in England for a company that made software for publishing documents. But he got bored and applied for a fellowship at CERN. In September 1984 he arrived back there to work with the group that was responsible for gathering the results of all of the experiments being done at the institute.

CERN was a cauldron of diverse peoples and computer systems using dozens of languages, both verbal and digital. All had to share information. “In this connected diversity,” Berners-Lee recalled, “CERN was a microcosm of the rest of the world.”¹⁵ In such a setting, he found himself returning to his childhood ruminations about how people with different perspectives work together to turn each other’s half-formed notions into new ideas. “I’ve always been interested in how people work together. I was working with a lot of people at other institutes and universities, and they had to collaborate. If they had been in the same room, they would have written all over the blackboard. I was looking for a system that would allow people to brainstorm and to keep track of the institutional memory of a project.”¹⁶

Such a system, he felt, would connect people from afar so that they could complete each other’s sentences and add useful ingredients to each other’s half-formed notions. “I wanted it to be something which would allow us to work together, design things together,” he said. “The really interesting part of the design is when we have lots of people all over the planet who have part of it in their heads. They have parts of the cure for AIDS, part of an understanding of cancer.”¹⁷ The goal was to facilitate team creativity—the brainstorming that occurs when people sit around fleshing out each other’s ideas—when the players are not in the same place.

So Berners-Lee reconstructed his Enquire program and began thinking about ways to expand it. “I wanted to access different kinds of information, such as a researcher’s technical papers, the manual for different software modules, minutes of meetings, hastily scribbled notes, and so on.”¹⁸ Actually, he wanted to do much more than that. He had the placid exterior of a congenital coder, but lurking underneath he harbored the whimsical curiosity of a child who stayed up late reading Enquire Within Upon Everything. Rather than merely devising a data management system, he yearned to create a collaborative playground. “I wanted to build a creative space,” he later said, “something like a sandpit where everyone could play together.”¹⁹

He hit upon a simple maneuver that would allow him to make the connections he wanted: hypertext. Now familiar to any Web surfer, hypertext is a word or phrase that is coded so that when clicked it sends the reader to another document or piece of content. Envisioned by Bush in his description of a memex machine, it was named in 1963 by the tech visionary Ted Nelson, who dreamed up a brilliantly ambitious project called Xanadu, never brought to fruition, in which all pieces of information would be published with two-way hypertext links to and from related information.

Hypertext was a way to allow the connections that were at the core of Berners-Lee’s Enquire program to proliferate like rabbits; anyone could link to documents on other computers, even those with different operating systems, without asking permission. “An Enquire program capable of external hypertext links was the difference between imprisonment and freedom,” he exulted. “New webs could be made to bind different computers together.” There would be no central node, no command hub. If you knew the web address of a document, you could link to it. That way the system of links could spread and sprawl, “riding on top of the Internet,” as Berners-Lee put it.²⁰ Once again, an innovation was created by weaving together two previous innovations: in this case, hypertext and the Internet.

Using a NeXT computer, the handsome hybrid of a workstation and personal computer that Jobs created after being ousted from Apple, Berners-Lee adapted a protocol that he had been working on, called a Remote Procedure Call, that allowed a program running on one computer to call up a subroutine that was on another computer. Then he drew up a set of principles for naming each document. Initially he called these Universal Document Identifiers. The folks at the Internet Engineering Task Force in charge of approving standards balked at what they said was his “arrogance” in calling his scheme universal. So he agreed to change it to uniform. In fact he was pushed into changing all three words, turning it into Uniform Resource Locators—those URLs, such as http://www.cern.ch, that we now use every day.²¹ By the end of 1990 he had created a suite of tools that allowed his network to come to life: a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to allow hypertext to be exchanged online, a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for creating pages, a rudimentary browser to serve as the application software that retrieved and displayed information, and server software that could respond to requests from the network.

In March 1989 Berners-Lee had his design in place and officially submitted a funding proposal to the top managers at CERN. “The hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve,” he wrote. “A ‘web’ of notes with links between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.”²² Unfortunately, his proposal elicited as much bafflement as enthusiasm. “Vague, but exciting,” his boss, Mike Sendall, wrote atop the memo. “When I read Tim’s proposal,” he later admitted, “I could not figure out what it was, but I thought it was great.”²³ Once again, a brilliant inventor found himself in need of a collaborator to turn a concept into a reality.

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