Tim Berners Lee Quotes

The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

I would have to create a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. That meant as close as possible to no rules at all.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in order to help him remember his colleagues at CERN. “The Web is more a social creation than a technical one,” he explains.

I found myself answering the same questions asked frequently of me by different people. It would be so much easier if everyone could just read my database.

In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

E-mail allowed messages to be sent from one person to another, but did not form a space in which information could permanently exists and be referred to.

The World Wide Web is a CERN offshoot. It was invented by a CERN scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989. 2

What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URLs, HTTP and HTML. There was no central computer "controlling" the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even organisation anywhere that "ran" the Web. The Web was not a physical "thing" that existed in a certain "place". It was a "space" in which information could exist.

launched the Web in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee

The spirit there was very decentralized. The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission. That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost.

I had argued that it was ridiculous for a person to have two separate interfaces, one for local information (the desktop of their own computer) and one for remote information (a browser to reach other computers). Why did we need an entire desktop for our own computer but get only a window through which to view the entire rest of the planet? Why, for that matter, should we have folders on our desktop but not on the web?

In his book Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, emphasizes the importance of the brain in the forming of connections (the italics are mine): A piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected. Berners-Lee

HTML originated from a prototype of a language created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. Berners-Lee felt that there was a possibility of linking documents together using hypertext, and the concept of HTML evolved from this. A breakthrough in this field of development

Most of systems still depended on some central node to which everything had to be connected [...]. I wanted the act of adding a link to be trivial. If i was, then a web of links could spread evenly across the globe.

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, describes the DNS system as the “one centralized Achilles’ heel by which {the Web} can all be brought down or controlled.

for Berners-Lee today there is some regret as he looks back at the birth of the Web. The Web was built to decentralize power and create open access, yet, he noted, “popular and successful services (search, social networking, email) have achieved near-monopoly status. Although industry leaders often spur positive change, we must remain wary of concentrations of power.” Notice the tentative voice: he doesn’t mention Google and Facebook by name. Tim Berners-Lee never got rich on his invention. He gave it to the world for free, so he remains dependent on research funding from giant corporations.

We can’t blame the technology when we make mistakes. —TIM BERNERS-LEE

Semantic search, as a concept, has been around since Tim Berners-Lee, the man who is frequently called the father of the Internet, wrote an article about it in 2001 in Scientific American. There he explained that the essence of semantic search is the use of mathematics to get rid of the guesswork and approximation used in search today and introduce a clear understanding of what words mean and how they connect with what we are actually looking for in the search engine box.

The spirit there was very decentralized. The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission,” he said. “That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost.

As Tim Berners-Lee has written, “The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared . . . What’s more, the fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to [weaponize] the web at scale.

Una tecnología implica una ideología, ya que afecta a la forma en que pensamos y actuamos y nos obliga a escoger varias formas de proceder. Nuevos artefactos generan su propia dinámica con consecuencias difíciles de predecir. Los inventores del automóvil no se imaginaban las consecuencias, y tampoco el inventor del World Wide Web podía imaginar la transformación social y cultural que está causando.

What would the world be like today if Tim Berners-Lee had never developed the World Wide Web? Or Alexander Fleming had never discovered penicillin and Frank Colton had not developed the oral contraceptive pill?

Mientras trabajaba en Suiza en el CERN (la organización europea de investigación nuclear), el físico británico Tim Berners-Lee inventó el World Wide Web en 1989.

one small team at DIA was in charge of creating a Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, and I tried to give them as much support as I could. Their charter was signed in 1990, the same year Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it’s better.