mirror, mirror

mirror, mirror photography by ssj

mirror mirror on the wall:
who is monitoring my calls,
my emails and my fb wall?

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Author’s Note:

On 12 November 1990, the World Wide Web was formally proposed as a project called “WorldWideWeb”[1] by its acknowledged inventor, Tim Berners-Lee[2], with the help of his colleague, Robert Cailliau[3], at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)[4]. Actual work on this project had been going on since 1989, so that by the time of the publishing of Berners-Lee’s formal proposal, it took him only another month to successfully test the first Web server in the laboratories of CERN[5]. By 6 August 1991, the first-ever web site[6] of the World Wide Web was put online containing the first web page address[7], and on 30 April 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web software to the public domain[8], eventually paving the way for the popular use of what we now simply refer to as the Internet.

The Internet of course did not really emerge from the efforts of Tim Berners-Lee & his colleagues at CERN. Far from it, the Internet preceded the World Wide Web by about 30 years, and would have been able to serve its own purposes well even without the World Wide Web coming into existence. The Internet in its entirety evolved through the works of numerous mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists working either in collaboration or separately from different parts of the world, over a long period of time starting from the early 20th century when fundamental theoretical work in data transmission and information theory were developed[9],[10],[11], to the advent of the digital computer in the 1940s and 50s[12], and finally to the development of packet switching technology[13] and the actual infrastructure and protocols of the Internet from the 1960s onwards[14],[15]. What Tim Berners-Lee accomplished by 1990 was the marriage of the hypertext system[16],[17] with the transmission protocol of the Internet to give birth to a new form of document: an online hypermedia document whose availability as a tool for popular use became a game changer not only for the traditional publishing industry, but for the knowledge industry in general.

These days, we take for granted that this hyperspace, that is the World Wide Web on the Internet, is the base that nurtures a large part of our experiences in social communication and personal expression. I take pause to open a new category about this technology in my blog, and with some of the items that I will be posting in November and beyond, I pay tribute to the wonders and perils of this fascinating landscape.

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