Tim Berners-Lee Says CERN Never Tried to Sell the Internet
I’ve twice now made reference to the time I was told by the current head of CERN that at one point they tried to put the World Wide Web concept up for sale only to discover that there were no buyers. Aaron Swartz asked Tim Berners-Lee about this and he says that’s not what happened:
No, they did not try to sell it it as far as I am aware. There was a certain amount of agonizing that CERN didn’t really have a story about what to do about spinning out technology. There were some arguing that the IPR should be kept by CERN, but no real plans as to what to do with it. Hey, if they had been MIT they might have encouraged me to spin it out as a startup, with the help of some experienced people who had done it before, and well, maybe the world would have just waited 17 years as it did for RSA. I am sure in fact a bunch of competing systems would have ended up without a single interoperable space.
Don’t want to be in the position of spreading wild rumors, so I thought y’all should know.
7 Responses to “Tim Berners-Lee Says CERN Never Tried to Sell the Internet”
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August 6th, 2009 at 10:31 am
The internet is a gift from government(s) to the free markets. Computer technology (and all modern electronics) owes a lot to Bell Labs (as well as wartime government research), which probably would not have existed in a true free-enterprise system.
Free enterprise is good at spin-offs, but for a long time most advances in technology have been made by governments or through some kind of government support. Keep this in mind when assuming that cap-and-trade will cause business to innovate new energy technology.
August 6th, 2009 at 10:59 am
The internet was a lucky accident and perhaps the greatest example around about the impossibility of prediction. Even Compuserve and AOL missed it and they were the first commercial users of the backbone. What is now head slapping obvious wasn’t just opaque to those in the best position to know,it was invisible.
That Al Gore grasped it and yet is mocked for it is one of the most bizarre examples of cognitive dissonance, or is it incoherence imaginable.
August 6th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
No matter what, CERN has a cool logo.
August 6th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Stop confusing “the internet” with “the World Wide Web”
August 6th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Umm, yes — WWW more accurately refers to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and HTML.
The internet existed long before the World Wide Web.
As an early user of the internet before there was a World Wide Web, I can tell you it was command-line and text based – quite different and primitive by today’s standards.
August 6th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Well, this is something that was intuitively necessary but, when it started, it wasn’t really there.
In the old days, you used an ftp protocol to access a site and retrieve a file you opened, usually in an editor. DOS would do it, but for pictures it made some odd results.
The first browser I downloaded, probably MOSAIC, looked really cool, but there were no websites! So AOL, with chatrooms and picture capability and an always-on interface, was a big thing in getting people to just log on and surf. But AOL was a kludge, basically the world’s biggest BBS.
So the http and html was really important, just about as important as Samuel Morse’s code that affixed his name forever to the telegraph that had already been invented and demonstrated before he became involved.
The html was another obvious necessity. Before html you could use publishing software (to print stuff on paper) but putting a face on your website was really difficult- even if you did, probably most visitors couldn’t read it.
IOW, somebody had to get there first, and for that they should get some credit for being some combination of clever and hardworking, but it’s not as though we never would have developed this stuff. At the very least, Bill Gates would have taken a crack at it with Windows, which was equally useless (no apps) when it appeared.
That said, there really was something cool about watching the old 540-kb DOS open the doors of universities a half world away.
August 6th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
The internet is a gift from government(s) to the free markets.
The market created the wealth the government used to develop the internet. National defense was the motive for the early development of the internet.