Word: braine
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This is "hypertext," and it was hardly new. The idea was outlined by Vannevar Bush in 1945 and envisioned as an appendage to the brain. Berners-Lee explains the brainlike structure of hypertext by reference to his cup of coffee. "If instead of coffee I'd brought in lilac," he says, sitting in a conference room in M.I.T.'s computer-science lab, "you'd have a strong association between the laboratory for computer science and lilac. You could walk by a lilac bush and be brought back to the laboratory." My brain would do this transporting via interlinked neurons...
...trouble with most hypertext systems, as of the late 1980s, was that they were in one sense unlike the brain. They had a centralized database that kept track of all the links so that if a document was deleted, all links to it from other documents could be erased; that way there are no "dangling links"--no arrows pointing to nothing, no mouse-clicks leading nowhere. When Berners-Lee attended hypertext exhibits and asked designers whether they could make their systems worldwide, they often said no, citing this need for a clearinghouse. Finally, "I realized that this dangling-link thing...
...This initial document didn't go down well," says Berners-Lee. But he persisted and won the indulgence of his boss, who okayed the purchase of a NeXT computer. Sitting on Berners-Lee's desk, it would become the first Web content "server," the first node in this global brain. In collaboration with colleagues, Berners-Lee developed the three technical keystones of the Web: the language for encoding documents (HTML, hypertext markup language); the system for linking documents (HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol); and the www.whatever system for addressing documents (URL, universal resource locator...
...concentrates, trying to put a finer point on his notion of divinity. A verse he's heard in church comes to mind, but all he can remember are fragments. "All souls may..." his voice trails off "...to seek the truth in love..." He is silent for a moment. His brain has failed him. Then inspiration strikes. "Maybe I can pick it up from the Web." In a single motion, he swivels his chair 180[degrees] and makes fluid contact with his IBM Thinkpad...
...fast, someone might say. The human brain is a machine too. How can we dismiss Deep Blue as just a machine when we don't dismiss the human brain as just a machine...