Word: cerned
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...started, of all places, in the Swiss Alps. The year was 1980. Berners-Lee, doing a six-month stint as a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, was noodling around with a way to organize his far-flung notes. He had always been interested in programs that dealt with information in a "brain-like way" but that could improve upon that occasionally memory-constrained organ. So he devised a piece of software that could, as he put it, keep "track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains...
...would have to do the dreary work of adding the new material to a central database. An even better solution would be to open up his document--and his computer--to everyone and allow them to link their stuff to his. He could limit access to his colleagues at CERN, but why stop there? Open it up to scientists everywhere! Let it span the networks! In Berners-Lee's scheme there would be no central manager, no central database and no scaling problems. The thing could grow like the Internet itself, open-ended and infinite. "One had to be able...
...physicists announced their results a fewweeks ago at a CERN conference. Gabrielse andKhabbaz have been working on this experiment forthe last two and a half years, and Gabrielse hasbeen working on similar experiments for a decade
...global hypertext system had been championed since the 1960s by a visionary named Ted Nelson, who had pursued it as the "Xanadu" project. But Nelson wanted Xanadu to make a profit, and this vastly complicated the system, which never got off the ground. Berners-Lee, in contrast, persuaded CERN to let go of intellectual property to get the Web airborne. A no-frills browser was put in the public domain--downloadable to all comers, who could use it, love it, send it to friends and even improve...
...turned out otherwise. Robert Cailliau of CERN, Berners-Lee's earliest collaborator on the project, describes the Web's prevailing top-down structure: "There's one point that puts the data out, and you're just a consumer." He finds this model--whose zenith is the coming wave of so-called push technology--an "absolute, utter disaster...