Word: widely
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pondered taking, and which he still speaks of with seemingly mixed emotions. His is also a story about the difficulty of controlling our progeny, about the risky business of creating momentous things, unleashing epic social forces. For Berners-Lee isn't altogether happy with how the World Wide Web has turned...
...even caused by--his decision back in 1992 to take the road less traveled. The question that fascinates people who have heard of Berners-Lee--Why isn't he rich?--may turn out to have the same answer as the question that fascinates him: Why isn't the World Wide Web better than...
...read science fiction, including Arthur C. Clarke's short story Dial F for Frankenstein. It is, he recalls, about "crossing the critical threshold of number of neurons," about "the point where enough computers get connected together" that the whole system "started to breathe, think, react autonomously." Could the World Wide Web actually realize Clarke's prophecy? No-- and yes. Berners-Lee warns against thinking of the Web as truly alive, as a literal global brain, but he does expect it to evince "emergent properties" that will transform society. Such as? Well, if he could tell you, they wouldn...
...random reasons" that Berners-Lee is known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, he says. "I happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I happened to have the right combination of background." The place was CERN, the European physics laboratory that straddles the Swiss-French border, and he was there twice. The first time, in 1980, he had to master its labyrinthine information system in the course of a six-month consultancy. That was when he created his personal memory substitute, a program called Enquire. It allowed him to fill a document with...
...what should he name his creation? Infomesh? No, that sounded like Infomess. The Information Mine? No, the acronym--TIM--would seem "egocentric." How about World Wide Web, or "www" for short? Hmm. He discussed it with his wife and colleagues and was informed that it was "really stupid," since "www" takes longer to say than "the World Wide...