Thursday, May 23, 2013
By the victors
Technological history, like national history, is written by the victors.
Gates and Jobs rewrote the history of desktop computing to make Gates and Jobs the pioneers, ignoring the 10-year runup to the PC by IBM and Dec and HP. All three of those stodgy old companies had desktop computers in the late '70s.
Similarly, the history of the Web has been rewritten so it starts with Tim Berners-Lee. Example of adulation in an NPR feature:
The story of the Web began in 1989 at a European particle physics laboratory called CERN. Hundreds of the world's smartest scientists were putting together huge experiments to hunt for new particles. They worked in teams; each scientist would build one little part — a circuit board or a piece of software. Then they'd put it all together. Tim Berners-Lee was working at the lab as a computer scientist, and he noticed a growing problem: Files from one computer rarely worked on another because researchers were coding information in different formats for different operating systems. "So, in fact, often you just had to go into the corridor and buy [the other guy] a coffee to find out how things worked," Berners-Lee says.Pure nonsense. All sorts of data were being moved around the (mostly academic) internet in 1975. Compuserve began online operations in 1978, and offered pretty much everything you can get on the Web now. It was severely limited by slow modems at the start, so big files like videos were wildly impractical but not impossible. You could download a one-minute video in MIME form if you were willing to tie up your phone line exclusively for a couple of days. Berners-Lee contributed a protocol that removed the 'proprietary-ness' of Compuserve and opened the Web to a wider variety of computers, but didn't really add any functionality. Fast data transfer is what added the functionality. ¶ 6:33 AM
