This is the second article in a series about legendary tech inventors. The first article was written about Vannevar Bush: the inventor of the Memex. This one is about sir Tim Berners-Lee: inventor of the World Wide Web.
Connections like the human brain
Tim studied physics and was a son of mathematicians. His parents programmed the first computer: Mark I. With his father he had discussions about the idea how to make a computer intuitive and how it could make connections like the human brain.
Just like Vannevar Bush, sir Berners-Lee was triggered by making connections of information like the human brain: “anything being potentially connected with anything”.
Organization structure as metaphor of the web
In 1980 he started working at CERN (European Particle Physics Laboratory) in Geneva. In his sparetime, as a side-project, he started coding on Enquire: his first weblike idea. The name was inspired by a book title at his parent’s house. It had to be a portal to a world of information. The side-project was not only to work on his larger idea, but also to know the connections between people, projects and computers in the lab. Information at the lab was fragmented due to the large scale.
The organizational structure of CERN was a web-like structure. It had no hierarchical structure. Organize data like a traditional database was not suitable in this situation. With nodes and links (like a network), people, machines and experiments could be connected for documentation.
“Can the web be a new way of working?”Tie different techniques together
Several people had similar concepts but they were never implemented. Also because it was not the right time for the particular inventions. Vannevar Bush with the memex, Ted Nelson invented Hypertext in 1956, Douglas Engelbart (the inventor of the computer mouse) made a online system for group work using hypertext and the Internet (by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn) as used by the Web for the universal connection between computers. For Tim it was the task to tie these techniques, hypertext (common format to display documents), possibility of linking documents and the internet, together.
Web of acronyms
The basic components of the web are HTML, URI and HTTP: HTML (the hypertext markup language for documents), URI (uniform resource indicator) as the address and HTTP as the protocol to communicate between web-client (browser) and the webserver.
Universal and decentralized
Two important elements of the web are universal and decentralized. Before there was a universal system like hypertext, researchers had to restructure their information to share it with others. The importance of decentralization is that users don’t have to ask access to the information. Many companies run their own information structures internally. It was the vision of Tim to decentralize this to create an organic growth of ideas, technology and society. The web is not a company / organization or single network. It has to be a global, information space in which computers could function. Companies have to turn hypertext systems into web clients.
Another aspect of decentralization is that it has to run and maintained by enthousiasts due to source code contributions. Thereby recommendations were given, not standards or regulations.
From fragmentation to common understanding
The next step is to turn the web into a Semantic Web: from fragmentation to common understanding. First there was a universal way needed to structure and share documents. In the semantic web global standards are needed so machines (computers) can understand and make associations.
Intuition is solving problems without a well-defined logical method. It’s like brainstorming in a group. Solutions will not arrive by a logical path but by connections and associations. On the web this will evolve when users will make links between ideas. Like complement on half-formed ideas in documents of others. A form of group intuition will arise.
Current state of the world wide web
Nowadays, Tim sees the web is not what it has to be in the first place and he wants to bring it back to its roots.
One example is that a part of the web is run by big tech companies. These parts are centralized and the web infrastructure is not independent (cross-layer). Like silos.
He is working on several projects to take control back to the user. He created a protocol called Solid. With Solid, Personal Online data (PODs) is owned by the user itself. Not by tech companies.