The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 109

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More than most digital-age innovations, the conception of the Web was driven primarily by one person. But Berners-Lee did need a partner in bringing it to fruition. Fortunately, he was able to find one in Robert Cailliau, a Belgian engineer at CERN, who had been toying with similar ideas and was willing to join forces. “In the marriage of hypertext and the Internet,” said Berners-Lee, “Robert was best man.”

With his personable demeanor and bureaucratic skills, Cailliau was the perfect person to be the evangelist for the project within CERN and the project manager who got things done. A fastidious dresser who methodically scheduled his haircuts, he was “the kind of engineer who can be driven mad by the incompatibility of power plugs in different countries,” according to Berners-Lee.²⁴ They formed a partnership often seen in innovative teams: the visionary product designer paired with the diligent project manager. Cailliau, who loved planning and organizational work, cleared the way, he said, for Berners-Lee to “bury his head in the bits and develop his software.” One day Cailliau tried to go over a project plan with Berners-Lee and realized, “He just did not understand the concept!”²⁵ Because of Cailliau, he didn’t have to.

Cailliau’s first contribution was to sharpen the funding proposal that Berners-Lee had submitted to CERN administrators by making it less vague while keeping it exciting. He began with its title, “Information Management.” Cailliau insisted that they figure out a catchier name for the project, which shouldn’t be too hard. Berners-Lee had a few ideas. The first was Mine of Information, but that abbreviated to MOI, French for me, which sounded a bit egocentric. The second idea was The Information Mine, but that abbreviated to TIM, which was even more so. Cailliau rejected the approach, often used at CERN, of plucking the name of some Greek god or Egyptian pharaoh. Then Berners-Lee came up with something that was direct and descriptive. “Let’s call it the World Wide Web,” he said. It was the metaphor he had used in his original proposal. Cailliau balked. “We can’t call it that, because the abbreviation WWW sounds longer than the full name!”²⁶ The initials have three times the syllables as the name itself. But Berners-Lee could be quietly stubborn. “It sounds good,” he declared. So the title of the proposal was changed to “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project.” Thus the Web was named.

Once the project was officially embraced, the CERN administrators wanted to patent it. When Cailliau raised the issue, Berners-Lee objected. He wanted the Web to spread and evolve as quickly as possible, and that meant it should be free and open. At one point he looked at Cailliau and asked accusingly, “Robert, do you want to be rich?” As Cailliau recalled, his initial reaction was “Well, it helps, no?”²⁷ That was the incorrect response. “He apparently didn’t care about that,” Cailliau realized. “Tim’s not in it for the money. He accepts a much wider range of hotel-room facilities than a CEO would.”²⁸

Instead Berners-Lee insisted that the Web protocols should be made available freely, shared openly, and put forever in the public domain. After all, the whole point of the Web, and the essence of its design, was to promote sharing and collaboration. CERN issued a document declaring that it “relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and redistribute it.”²⁹ Eventually CERN joined forces with Richard Stallman and adopted his GNU General Public License. The result was one of the grandest free and open-source projects in history.

That approach reflected Berners-Lee’s self-effacing style. He was averse to any hint of personal aggrandizement. Its wellsprings also came from someplace deeper within him: a moral outlook based on peer sharing and respect, something he found in the Unitarian Universalist Church that he adopted. As he said of his fellow Unitarians, “They meet in churches instead of wired hotels, and discuss justice, peace, conflict, and morality rather than protocols and data formats, but in other ways the peer respect is very similar to that of the Internet Engineering Task Force. . . . The design of the Internet and the Web is a search for a set of rules which will allow computers to work together in harmony, and our spiritual and social quest is for a set of rules which allow people to work together in harmony.”³⁰

Despite the hoopla that accompanies many product announcements—think Bell Labs unveiling the transistor or Steve Jobs the Macintosh—some of the most momentous innovations tiptoe quietly onto history’s stage. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee was glancing through the Internet’s alt.hypertext newsgroup and ran across this question: “Is anyone aware of research or development efforts in . . . hypertext links enabling retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources?” His answer, “from: [email protected] at 2:56 pm,” became the first public announcement of the Web. “The WorldWideWeb project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere,” he began. “If you’re interested in using the code, mail me.”³¹

With his low-key personality and even lower-key posting, Berners-Lee did not fathom what a profound idea he had unleashed. Any information anywhere. “I spent a lot of time trying to make sure people could put anything on the web,” he said more than two decades later. “I had no idea that people would put literally everything on it.”³² Yes, everything. Enquire Within Upon Everything.

MARC ANDREESSEN AND MOSAIC

For people to summon forth sites on the Web, they needed a piece of client software on their own computers that became known as a browser. Berners-Lee wrote one that could both read and edit documents; his hope was that the Web would become a place where users could collaborate. But his browser worked only on NeXT computers, of which there were few, and he had neither the time nor the resources to create other browser versions. So he enlisted a young intern at CERN, an undergraduate named Nicola Pellow who was majoring in math at Leicester Polytechnic, to write the first all-purpose browser for UNIX and Microsoft operating systems. It was rudimentary, but it worked. “It was to be the vehicle that allowed the Web to take its first tentative step on to the world stage, but Pellow was unfazed,” Cailliau recalled. “She was given the task and she simply sat down to do it, little realizing the enormity of what she was about to unleash.”³³ Then she went back to Leicester Polytechnic.

Berners-Lee began urging others to improve on Pellow’s work: “We energetically suggested to everyone everywhere that the creation of browsers would make useful projects.”³⁴ By the fall of 1991 there were a half-dozen experimental versions, and the Web quickly spread to other research centers in Europe.

That December it made the leap across the Atlantic. Paul Kunz, a particle physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, was visiting CERN, and Berners-Lee recruited him to the world of the Web. “He twisted my arm and insisted that I come see him,” according to Kunz, who worried that he was in for a boring demonstration of information management. “But then he showed me something that opened my eyes.”³⁵ It was a Web browser on Berners-Lee’s NeXT calling up information from an IBM machine somewhere else. Kunz brought the software back with him, and http://slacvm.slac.stanford.edu/ became the first Web server in the United States.

The World Wide Web hit orbital velocity in 1993. The year began with fifty Web servers in the world, and by October there were five hundred. One reason was that the primary alternative to the Web for accessing information on the Internet was a sending and fetching protocol developed at the University of Minnesota called Gopher,^I and word leaked out that the developers were planning to charge a fee for use of the server software. A more important impetus was the creation of the first easy-to-install Web browser with graphic capabilities, named Mosaic. It was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which had been funded by the Gore Act.

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