Thursday, January 01, 2004
Rise, Sir Tim!
Assuming one does give a damn about KBE's (hello Mr. Richards), I can't think of a person more richly deserving of the honour, or any other honour for that matter, than Tim Berners-Lee. Buckingham Palace announced that Sir Tim had made it to the Queen's New Year honours list.
For those who came in late....
Berners-Lee came up with the idea of what he called "global hypertext space" while working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory at CERN in 1989. Until then, hypertext was used to mark up documents but contained no notion of linking to documents on other computers. Berners-Lee's innovation was to develop a Universal Document Identifier (UDI), later to become known as a Universal Resource Locator (URL). URLs are now commonly referred to as Web addresses and appear in a browser's address bar.
The closest thing at the time to what was to become HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) was Apple's Hypercard program--what former Apple CEO John Sculley recently said was one of Apple's biggest missed opportunities.
While Apple fumbled, over at CERN, Berners-Lee wrote a program called WorlDwidEweb, a point-and-click hypertext editor that ran on the NeXT machine--which, ironically, was developed by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Interestingly, Berners-Lee got news of his becoming a knight commander of the british empire on the phone, not via e-mail :)
For those who came in late....
Berners-Lee came up with the idea of what he called "global hypertext space" while working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory at CERN in 1989. Until then, hypertext was used to mark up documents but contained no notion of linking to documents on other computers. Berners-Lee's innovation was to develop a Universal Document Identifier (UDI), later to become known as a Universal Resource Locator (URL). URLs are now commonly referred to as Web addresses and appear in a browser's address bar.
The closest thing at the time to what was to become HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) was Apple's Hypercard program--what former Apple CEO John Sculley recently said was one of Apple's biggest missed opportunities.
While Apple fumbled, over at CERN, Berners-Lee wrote a program called WorlDwidEweb, a point-and-click hypertext editor that ran on the NeXT machine--which, ironically, was developed by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Interestingly, Berners-Lee got news of his becoming a knight commander of the british empire on the phone, not via e-mail :)
