U.N. proposes changes to Net's operation

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Re:...Re:except....

Blake, I'll respond here since the thread was apparently cut off (by you?):

"The fact is Tim Berners-Lee was the first person too actually put the concept of hyperlinking to use. Tim Berners-Lee demonstrated the concept of hyperlinks in the very first web page."

Hyperlinking was used/demonstrated during a demonstration of the mouse in 1968 at Stanford. TBL demonstrated the concept on the Internet.


"The beginnings of the Internet started in 1968 with ARPANET the United Stated had control of this technology for 28 years yet the US did little with it. Tim Berners-Lee launched the first web page in 1996, 28 years later!!!!!! How many people here knew the Internets roots go back some 38 years !

Instead of celebrating the inventors of TCP/IP and the various other protocols they should be chastised for allowing this technology to sit stagnant for 28 years."

ARAPNET was a Defense Department project. NSFNET, which benefited from that project and is more of the baby Internet, did not come online until the early 1980's and was not open to commercial interests until the mid-1980's. Even then, connections were made from other networks via gateways until most everybody transitioned to TCP/IP. Much of that didn't occur until the early 1990s, around the same time as the Web was developed.

In other words, the network and protocols did not spring into being overnight and sit stagnant for 28 years. Who's revising history now?


"While it is true the US was responsible for developing the very basic tools. In this case a large decentralized computer network consisting of approximately 50,000 computers. That's all it was it was a basic tool with no common unity. Before the WWW the Internet was useless to the average computer user. Only wealthy computer users who possessed well above average computer skills could navigate the network using primitive and somewhat cryptic command line tools, and still afford the high connection costs! The average Windows user can't seem to remember apt-get update, I can't fathom them remembering how to log into a remote FTP server via the CLI. Considering how most widows users are scared to death of the CLI I can't imagine the Internet would have gone very far or have become popular with the average user."

There were other early GUI interfaces but they fell out of favor, probably in some part due to the connection costs and proprietary nature of those services. For example, AOL was easier to use than the early web was but it was more costly and eventually the Web caught up in both ease of use and breadth of desirable content.

"I think its safe to say without the World Wide Web the Internet would still be some obscure project with little public exposure or use. I think its time Americans give credit where credit is do and quite trying to miss lead people and diminish the importance of the EU's contributions to the success of the Internet."

I disagree that it would still be an obscure project. More likely, it would be operating with a different type of GUI with much the same result. There were other competing interfaces, WWW just became the most popular one, in large part because of it's low cost compared to the alternatives (best bang for the buck, capitalism at work).


"Further more you should be thankful someone other than an American Invented the WWW. If an American would have invented the WWW you can be guaranteed that they would have patented the concept and you would be paying a few Penny's royalty every time you loaded a web page!"

If that were true, Americans could be doing that already by virtue of the protocols it runs on top of.

Posted by: sullivanjc   Posted on: 11/02/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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