Why you are getting downvoted:

Everyone here knows (or should know) that the internet started in the 60s (kinda, 1986 definitely), and WWW was a short project in 1989-1990 by TimBL, which just happened to catch on like wildfire (due to bandwidth increases, and cheap PCs more than anything else).

Tim Berners-Lee invented the first cut of HTTP (GET / POST etc), and got the ball rolling on HTML (which was basically a clone of the 1960s SGML).

Paul Otlet seems to have been something of a visionary (just like Ted Nelson, Project Xanadu's head).

TimBL was just in the right place, at the right time.

But it's silly to say that his only contribution was a few months writing WWW. He also wrote ENQUIRE 10 years before, which was kind of like Apple's HyperCard (1987 - between ENQUIRE and WWW).

There were lots of other Hypertext systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Implementations). But that doesn't mean TimBL was a fraud, simply that the media loves to simplify this kind of thing.

Not quite actually refuting what you said: HTML was certainly based on SGML (the similarity is obvious!), but it never was an SGML application. It only became an SGML application in the spec a couple of years later at the impetuous of DanC — no major HTML consumer has ever used an SGML parser for HTML.

> the internet started in the 60s (kinda, 1986 definitely)

There are three years you can reasonably point to:

1969 was when the ARPANET project was founded by the DoD. This is the kitchen-sink-historian viewpoint: The ARPANET was the first packet-switched network and was certainly the ancestor of the Internet, but very little specific has carried over into the modern day. The main innovation from this early was packet-switching, or dividing up the message into a lot of little packets that are all individually addressed and can each make their own way to their ultimate destination. This provides reliability, simplicity, and economy compared to the phone system.

1977 was when the first gateway was demonstrated: Specifically, it was the first TCP-based transmission between three dissimilar networks. This is the functionalist viewpoint: Both TCP and the heterogeneous network-of-networks concept are essential to the modern Internet. The network-of-networks concept (implemented by gateways) allows different physical networks to share the same data, for example phone lines and Ethernet cables and WiFi. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) guarantees reliable and in-order transmission of data over unreliable physical networks, mainly by resending packets that got lost. Once you have gateways and TCP, you have the modern Internet. http://www.computerhistory.org/press/30th-anniversary-intern...

1983 was when NCP was ditched for TCP/IP on the ARPANET. This is the most restrictive/pragmatic view: NCP was the underlying protocol suite/software used on the early experimental ARPANET, whereas the TCP/IP protocol suite (as implemented by a lot of different software) is what we use today. NCP was implemented by specialized hardware and would have been prohibitively expensive to replicate anywhere else, whereas the TCP/IP stack has been implemented multiple times for multiple kinds of hardware and on multiple OSes. TCP/IP allowed the Internet to take off.

Hobbs' Internet Timeline is interesting: http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

I am being downvoted, because my assertions (admittedly in unpolished form) aren't backed by popular views (some of which are polished products, Manufacturing Consent) and because I stick to my guns and do my best to warn others about some things that are (not) supposed to happen especially at CERN.

simply that the media loves to simplify this kind of thing.

The media (and the beeb, almost openly since Dr. Kelly) does what it has been "ordered" to do, ie. "maximising opportunity and minimising threat":

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343

ps: Enquire was a Gutenberg project alike of a book (read digital form), which is admitted by TimBL. But you are right: information systems existed for a long time, and presumably will for a long time.

> I am being downvoted, because my assertions (admittedly in unpolished form)

You're being downvoted because you keep reposting (word-for-word) the same nonsensical rant on HN[0] and various other places around the web. Perhaps you could tidy it up between now and the next time you repost it so that we can understand your argument.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842382

I've reread this post three times and it's still complete gibberish to me. Can someone explain it?

'Create' is a crank is probably the simplest explanation.

I've been going through Create's profile trying to figure out if he's a crank, or just not a native speaker and overexcited. He seems like he's usually much more fluent, lucid and insightful. Still not 100% sure, but it's disappointing to see a hint of such interesting dissent, stated so invitingly cryptically, be casually dismissed and ridiculed.

I think he may have a legitimate point to discuss. This old comment of his gives a clue as to what he's on about:

"""Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines. What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was quite graphical programming, and not world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around -- certainly not western equivalents.

Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. world-wide. Nobody was astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic. They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given away without charge. WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of.

CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Veltman if you feel to downvote this because of CERN."""

-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4046835

"CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. "

And this is different from all other labs... how?

Mr Bean made an appearance as a keyboard player at the London 2012 opening ceremony.

I honestly thought this comment was generated using a markov chain. If it isn't, I suggest strongly that you work on your writing.

Don't listen to (ie. read) me. This writing was never supposed to be an essay to argue for or against something. It is an almost raw braindump: just a set of links so you can do your own research and make up your mind on your own.

It isn't for pleasing anybody in eloquence, but to warn.

Hint: comments are for communicating stuff to people. Posting a braindump and pretty much saying 'just figure out what I meant for yourself' is both rude and annoying.

Personally I didn't open any of the links. But thanks for trying to educate me all the same.

I don't even know what you're trying to say. That TBL is a fraud? Why so bitter?

Having single-handedly invented WWW is a nonsense, put a failed physicist aside reinventing himself. Not to mention [S]GML, the stuff wired though using RPC. Claiming credit for other's hard work and even visions without attribution is even worse, especially in science ("Institute for Web Science"? wtf). There have been lots of prior art graphical networked markup hypertext systems, ie. Xerox, Walker's Symbolics Document Examiner etc. Having used the interface builder to dump the stuff coming from the network?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A#t=23m15s

I am bitter because of the manipulative sociopaths abusing their position and power.

So you're angry because others did similar work before TBL, and because TBL is the one who got famous, you think that he is a manipulative sociopath. I see.

Clearly none of the people involved before had the spark of whatever it takes to turn it from an interesting project into something that sparked the imagination of everyone around them by giving it it's essential context. For some reason you don't seems to see that as being valuable. I see it as another form of genius.

"I am bitter because of the manipulative sociopaths abusing their position and power."

I guess your whole plan to get rich off of Videotex and the Prodigy online service just didn't work out, because of that meddling TBL.

> Today, if you'd ask for a NeXT-like toy, you'd be denied were you an average Eastern

An average Eastern what? Very, very few people anywhere got a NeXT system.

> the gopher link address ptr

Gopher had its chance, but the University of Minnesota thought it would be reasonable to charge licensing fees. The WWW won for multiple reasons, and that was a big one early on.

You really need to do some research.

Very, very few people anywhere got a NeXT system. ...and therefore has little relevance to something dispersed World Wide.

Thanks for your kind advice: I did my fair amount of "research"[1] and therefore had my fair share of TBL-s western colleagues too in the process, calendaring theory included.

You are right: WWW won for multiple reasons. First and foremost, they could afford to give it away for free, since it was produced by cheap disposable labour. And it also won, because of a change in legislation in the U.S.A., and those "analysts" who caught early wind of it wound up well (see Ferguson from Vermeer tech.: his book is also a nemesis to the Silicon Valley Tune). Even better, look into IB's story. The French lisper never got the real credit he deserves. Even Groff and BL have trouble remembering his name. You are picking on the wrong person.

[1] "what this thing called PhD actually is" -- http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir-comments.htm

> Very, very few people anywhere got a NeXT system. ...and therefore has little relevance to something dispersed World Wide

Obviously untrue, given that the WWW was developed on a NeXT system.

> First and foremost, they could afford to give it away for free, since it was produced by cheap disposable labour.

I doubt TimBL was starving in a garret when he wrote the first WWW software; it could be given away because CERN had funding that had nothing to do with selling software, especially not software that solved a problem everyone up to that point thought had been solved already (with Gopher and FTP), or would be solved another way entirely (with Xanadu).

What do you want to say with the last four paragraphs? That's value as in monetary value, i.e. about the costs of the calorimeter system described in the report, taking into account labor costs in different countries. It has nothing to do with the other meaning of value, i.e. how the contributions of "non-western members" are valued.

Racism is still pervasive in western countries, so it's certainly possible – my guess is likely – that it plays some role even at CERN, but what you are quoting there is no evidence for racism. That's an absurd interpretation.

Do not think, that value as in monetary value just stays in a spreadsheet cell at HR. The evaluation has consequences in all other evaluations, peer evaluations etc. It does contribute to the evaluation of contributions (ie. CHEP).

Myself should be enough evidence. Hence my bitterness.

Maybe your contributions are devalued because they're incoherent?

Drugs are bad, mmk?