Starting in the 1960's the internet was developed to send information between computers. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, however, sought to use the internet nodes and combine hypertext and domains. Berners-Lee is a English computer scientist who is credited with creating the World Wide Web.
He developed the idea for creating the web when he was an independent contractor that focused heavily on sharing information between different researchers in different locations. To make this process easier he thought of using a system that was based on hypertext (an electronic language). The system that he developed to solve the problem of electronic data sharing to researchers that were far away was called ENQUIRE.
 |
| The computer Berners-Lee used to create the ENQUIRE program |
In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web consortium. The organisation was created to improve the quality and standard of the web. He could have tried to earn money off of his creation but instead offered it to the world with no patent. His reasoning was that if he did not offer it for free someone else would have eventually created the same thing for free.
In "Creating Minds", Gardner suggests that "creativity is far more often characterized by the fashioning of a new kind of product, or by the discovery of an unknown or neglected set of issues or themes that call for fresh exploration". In the development of the web, Berners-Lee explored what could possibly be done with the internet and created something truly world changing.
Works cited:
http://www.biographyonline.net/business/tim-berners-lee.html
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Great post Sam. I was always interested in how the internet was invented, and who invented it, but I never took the time to research it. I feel like Silicon Valley, and the monetary culture that is developing behind internet (looking at you, Comcast), is a contradiction of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's decision to release his work without a patent. I am curious to what Sir Lee thought the implications of the internet would be back in the 1980s. I doubt anyone could have thought this would be the new form of communication and even medium to talk about creativity.
ReplyDelete