141–150 of 305 posts
I do think he probably should have started a browser company or something though. The nice thing is that his beautiful dream for the web is (slowly) coming true.
I love looking at that NeXT box he used as the first web server: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd
When I was an MIT student I worked one summer at CSAIL. The office I was in had only a single occupancy bathroom. One afternoon I went to use it and just as I got there I saw that TBL was exiting. Once I went in and sat down, I noticed that the seat was warm ! Highlight of my life right there, having my butt warmed by the residual heat of the inventor of the www's butt. Ahem, in any case, congrats to him! Definitely…
This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people's lives. EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.
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At least it's still mainly interoperable with 3rd party solutions through open standards. I host my own email and as long as you adhere to the guidelines (use DKIM, make sure your IP range isn't part of some blacklist, triple check your postfix config etc...) you don't feel like a 2nd class netitizen.
Not quite. You still (in my experience) need to go through obscure web-forms to avoid having gmail/hotmail black list your domain. And even then gmail is way too aggressive with its spam labeling. I've seen replies to an email thread be marked as spam by gmail when the sender is in the recipient's address book. Gmail considers anything beyond big corporate email providers as second class participants - and so does th…
This may not apply if you are a low volume sender.
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As a matter of fact, this is what Sir Berners Lee is working on right now at MIT. https://solid.mit.edu/ The issue is not storing the data, just like "email" doesn't store data. It's just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service. Ex: Don't like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don't lose the ability to interact with peop…
But half the point of a social network isn't the ability to communicate, but rather the history you've built there. Likewise, half the value of email isn't the ability to send a message to anyone, but the history of emails you have. Sure email isn't a data storage method, but in reality? Yeah, email is a data storage method. That's why Gmail gives me 25GB for free. Not because that's the size of my inbox, but because…
It doesn't need to be. For example, I moved my email between IMAP servers multiple times simply by dragging & dropping a swath of messages in Outlook. That Outlook (of all programs!) is the only tool that I know of that makes this easy is not a problem with the decentralized nature of email but simply with mediocre client implementations.
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Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.
As a matter of fact, this is what Sir Berners Lee is working on right now at MIT. https://solid.mit.edu/ The issue is not storing the data, just like "email" doesn't store data. It's just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service. Ex: Don't like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don't lose the ability to interact with peop…
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> This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Claude Shannon never won it.
That's an interesting point. I interpret the prize's criteria "for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community" to be less in Claude's space and more in the applied space. Scrolling down through the list of past winners, I've implemented several of the work of winners and am using the WWW right now to communicate this. On the other hand, I think I use Claude's work in the same sense that I use…
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According to Wikipedia and himself, he wrote up a proposal and was encouraged by his boss to implement it as an "unofficial" project: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#Influences
You can read the original proposal here: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
The applications of hypermedia were clearly in the ether in thay era, but that document certainly pulls a lot of the threads together.
For anyone who doesn't know, the www is a a "hypertext" project where documents can contain links to each other. By clicking these links, a wide variety of content is exposed. For example, consider how much easier it is to use Wikipedia than to have to look up references in the index (page numbers by word occurrence) of a printed book. You can just click on a link and follow it. In all, most people spend most of thei…
TBL created the web, certainly - but hypertext prior to the web goes far back as an idea (at least as far back as Alan Kay - also an ACM Turing Award winner, IIRC)...
I haven't heard Kay mentioned as an early proponent of hypertext, I'd be interested to hear more if you can find it.
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As a matter of fact, this is what Sir Berners Lee is working on right now at MIT. https://solid.mit.edu/ The issue is not storing the data, just like "email" doesn't store data. It's just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service. Ex: Don't like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don't lose the ability to interact with peop…
But half the point of a social network isn't the ability to communicate, but rather the history you've built there. Likewise, half the value of email isn't the ability to send a message to anyone, but the history of emails you have. Sure email isn't a data storage method, but in reality? Yeah, email is a data storage method. That's why Gmail gives me 25GB for free. Not because that's the size of my inbox, but because…