| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780062515872 | | Publisher: HarperBusiness | | Publish Date: 4/10/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 30645308 | | Item#: RVRR9D | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5.5L x 0.75T | | Pages: 240 |
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| | | | "When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING, a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parent's house outside London..." (from the first line) "What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There was no central computer "controlling" the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even an organization 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..." Hailed by "Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest minds of the century, Tim Berners-Lee, the genius behind the Internet reveals where it came from, reflects on its impact, and predicts where it is headed.
From the Publisher
Hailed by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest minds of the century, Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for arguably the most important advancement of the late 20th century: the World Wide Web. Now, this low-profile genius offers a compelling portrait of his invention -- revealing the Web's origins and the creation of the now-ubiquitous http and www acronyms -- and shares his views on such critical issues as censorship, privacy, the increasing power of software companies, and the need to find the ideal balance between commercial and social forces. He also shows readers how to use the Web to its fullest advantage, and presents his own plan for its future, calling for the active support and participation of programmers, computer manufacturers, and social organizations to manage and maintain this valuable resource so that it can remain a powerful force for social change and an outlet for individual creativity.
Annotation:
In this accessible account, an Internet pioneer describes how he designed the World Wide Web and shares his hopes for its social and technological future. Berners-Lee recounts the early days of creating a hypertext-linked network that would eventually fundamentally change business and culture, and documents his work at the nonprofit World Wide Web Consortium to balance the Web's commercial and creative, collaborative potential.
| PraiseWall Street Journal
"Anyone doubting just how much a work in progress the Internet remains should grab a copy of this book....In WEAVING THE WEB, Mr. Berners-Lee, using analogies and layman's terms, chronicles the development of his brainchild and then describes its 'ultimate destiny.' If his style of writing is unremarkable, the subject matter more than compensates.....[This book] is an insightful history of one of the century's most important inventions." - Jason L. Riley 10/01/1999San Francisco Chronicle
"In a world less obsessed with money, Tim Berners-Lee would be more celebrated than all the dot-com billionaires put together....Any reader of WEAVING THE WEB will feel a little better knowing that Berners-Lee is keeping watch." - David Streitfeld 10/10/1999 SunWorld
"What is Berners-Lee, some sort of idealistic hermit? As WEAVING THE WEB: THE ORIGINAL DESIGN AND ULTIMATE DESTINY OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB BY ITS INVENTOR matter-of-factly shows, the answer is a resounding on. Berners-Lee has a clear vision for the Web, and a firm set of priorities in life....In WEAVING THE WEB, Berners-Lee tells the story up to this point in a very plain, matter-of-fact style. The narrative is virtually bereft of the attitudes one might expect from someone at the center of such a momentous technological development. There is no self-righteousness, no ad hominem insults hurled at CERN bureaucrats and others who 'didn't get it,' not even any false modesty. This tone is incredibly refreshing." - Bill Rosenblatt December 1999 Industry Standard
"Written in an easy-to-read, conversational style, the book may finally bring about what Berners-Lee's modesty has helped prevent in the past. He may finally achieve in the public eye, instead of only in the annals of technology history, his rightful place as creator of the Web." - Elizabeth Wasserman 11/08/1999 |
| Author Bio| Tim Berners-Lee | | Berners-Lee grew up in South London in a household charged with discussions of mathematics and computers. His parents, both mathematicians, met in the 1950s while programming the Ferranti Mark I, the first commercial computer. As a boy, he liked reading science fiction and tinkering with electronics. As his interest in computers developed, he began to share his parents' frustrations with them, mainly the inability to use the computer to replicate human thought patterns. His interest in engineering and mathematics led him to physics, which he then envisioned as a hybrid of these two fields. Although the subject of physics didn't turn out as Berners-Lee had planned, he claimed that its study prepared him for understanding problems at both the micro and the macro level. He graduated from Queens College in 1976 with a degree in physics and no interest in pursuing the field to the Ph.D. level. At this time, microprocessors were becoming more common and Berners-Lee returned to his love of electronics, joining a telecommunications firm briefly. He then moved to Geneva in 1980 for a series of contract positions at CERN (The European Particle Physics Laboratory). While working on physics projects, he noticed a lack of communication among CERN researchers who were spread out across the globe and created an internal hypertext program to unify them. Enquire Within upon Everything, named after a Victorian reference book he remembered from his childhood, was a weblike program that was not yet connected to Internet technology. He then released the "World Wide Web" program in 1987, allowing users of different operating systems to access the same data by using a hypertext network. Many of Berners-Lee's colleagues at CERN and in the computer industry did not immediately recognize the technology's potential. The physicist became a Web evangelist, trying to convince others to join his efforts in perfecting this hybrid of hypertext and Internet technologies. Although it took years of convincing and tweaking, Berners-Lee began to see his invention spread and to see the growth of proprietary technologies that interfered with his vision for the Web. Due to CERN's focus in physics, Berners-Lee considered other options to be able to work on full-time Web development--including venturing into the profitable technology private sector. Instead he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1994 and formed the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), a nonprofit organization that recommends Web standards that benefit both businesses and consumers. Although not technically a regulatory body, the WC3 influences both government regulators and technology developers to maintain a commercially viable, yet consumer- and research-friendly medium. Married with two children, Berners-Lee guards his private life intensely and doesn't like to give interviews. His frustrations over inaccurate media coverage intensified after a television reporter in 1996 went to a commercial break saying, "We'll back in a few minutes with Tim Berners-Lee, and his plans to control the Internet." In his 1999 book, WEAVING THE WEB, he repeatedly defended his interest in the Web as a universal medium, drawing parallels from the underlying principles in his invention to the Unitarian Universalist Church that he joined later. |
| | Read A Chapter | Chapter OneEnquire Within upon EverythingWhen I first began tinkering with a software program that even-tually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for Enquire Within upon Everything, a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents' house outside London. With its title suggestive of magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money. Not a perfect analogy for the Web, but a primitive starting point. What that first bit of Enquire code led me to was something much larger, a vision encompassing the decentralized, organic growth of ideas, technology, and society. The vision I have for the 'Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarch Click to read more... Chapter OneEnquire Within upon EverythingWhen I first began tinkering with a software program that even-tually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for Enquire Within upon Everything, a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents' house outside London. With its title suggestive of magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money. Not a perfect analogy for the Web, but a primitive starting point. What that first bit of Enquire code led me to was something much larger, a vision encompassing the decentralized, organic growth of ideas, technology, and society. The vision I have for the 'Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we bound our-selves. It leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many. It leaves our previous fears for the future as one set among many. And it brings the workings of society closer to the workings of our minds. Unlike Enquire Within upon Everything, the Web that I have tried to foster is, not merely a vein of information to be mined, nor is it just a reference or research tool. Despite the fact that the ubiquitous www and .com now fuel electronic commerce and stock markets all over the world, this is a large, but just one, part of the Web. Buying books from Amazon.com and stocks from E-trade is not all there is to the Web. Neither is the Web some idealized space where we must remove our shoes, eat only fallen fruit, and eschew commercialization. The irony is that in all its various guises-commerce, research, and surfing-the Web is already so much a part of our lives that familiarity has clouded our perception of the Web itself. To understand the Web in the broadest and deepest sense, to fully partake of the vision that I and my colleagues share, one must understand how the Web came to be. The story of how the Web was created has been told in various books and magazines. Many accounts I've read have been distorted or just plain wrong. The Web resulted from many influences on my mind, half-formed thoughts, disparate conversations, and seem-ingly disconnected experiments. I pieced it together as I pursued my regular work and personal life. I articulated the vision, wrote the first Web programs, and came up with the now pervasive acronyms URL (then UDI), HTTP, HTML, and, of course, World Wide Web. But many other people, most of them unknown, con-tributed essential ingredients, in much the same almost random fashion. A group of individuals holding a common dream and working together at a distance brought about a great change. My telling of the real story will show how the Web's evolu-tion and its essence are inextricably linked. Only by understand- ing the Web at this deeper level will people ever truly grasp what its full potential can be. Journalists have always asked me what the crucial idea was, or what the singular event was, that allowed the Web to exist one day when it hadn't the day before. They are frustrated when I tell them there was no "Eureka!" moment. It was not like the legendary apple falling on Newton's head to demonstrate the concept of gravity. Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realization that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realizations from many sides, until, by the wondrous offices of the human mind, a new concept jelled. It was a process of accretion, not the linear solving of one well-defined problem after another. I am the son of mathematicians. My mother and father were part of the team that programmed the world's first commercial, stored-program computer, the Manchester University 'Mark I,' which was sold by Ferranti Ltd. in the early 1950s. The were full of excitement over the idea that, in principle, a person could program a computer to do most anything. They also knew, however, that computers were good at logical organizing and process-ing, but not random associations. A computer typically keeps information in rigid hierarchies and matrices, whereas the human mind has the special ability to link random bits of data. When I smell coffee, strong and stale, I may find myself again in a small room over a corner coffeehouse in Oxford. My brain makes a link, and instantly transports me there. One day when I came home from high school, I found my father working on a speech for Basil de Ferranti. He was reading books on the brain, looking for clues about how to make a com-puter intuitive, able to complete connections as the brain did. We discussed the point; then my father went on to his speech and I went on to my homework. But the idea stayed with me that com-puters could become much more powerful if they could be pro-grammed to link otherwise unconnected information. This challenge stayed on my mind throughout my studies at Queen's College at Oxford University, where I graduated in 1976 with a degree in physics. It remained in the background when I built my own computer with an early microprocessor, an old television, and a soldering iron, as well as during the few years I spent as a software engineer with Plessey Telecommunications and with D.G. Nash Ltd. Then, in 1980, 1 took a brief software consulting job with CERN the famous European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. That's where I wrote Enquire, my first weblike program. I wrote it in my spare time and for my personal use, and for no loftier reason than to help me remember the connections among the various people, computers, and projects at the lab. Still, the larger vision had taken firm root in my consciousness. Continues...
Excerpted from Weaving the Web by Berners-Lee, Tim Copyright © 2004 by Tim Berners-Lee. Excerpted by permission.
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