welcome back today we're going to talk about Tim burner's Lee and the creation of the worldwide web now most of the things that get created during the digital Revolution were done by teams they were collaborative efforts the worldwide web is one of the few that had a lead Creator and that was Tim burner Lee now what is the worldwide web is it the same as the internet we sometimes confuse them no actually the web is just a way of navigating the Internet it's a set of protocols to make the internet uh more accessible the internet as we saw sort of began back in 1969 when arpanet its predecessor was launched for more than 20 years after that there was no such thing as the worldwide web if you wanted to navigate uh the internet there were various ways to do so there was gopher uh created at the University of Minnesota named after the mascot of the University which is a gopher but it was also a bit of a pun because it would gopher things and when you were searching for them uh that were on internet servers and there were ways to search uh through the Gopher sit including with search engines like Archie and Veronica named after the uh carto comic book characters and another way of sending and fetching things from the internet was tnet there were also online services one of the greatest of which was the well you could dial up go to the well and then' be discussion boards a very serious one Stuart brand helped create it and one of the rules was you own your own words you had to take responsibility for what you said unlike let us say the post on Facebook and then there were uh services like CompuServe and Prodigy not really part not really the internet itself they were dialup service where you could use a lot of content that those companies had put online and eventually that let you go to some of the bulletin boards that existed on uh the internet itself and finally there was America online one of the great dialup Services especially in the late 80s and the 1990s before the gore Act of 91 and '92 allowed people to go straight to the internet you dial up on America online and it was say things like you've got mail and it would give you your mail and it would curate various things including news and sports and weather and it used the backbone of the internet to get it to you but it was not really the internet itself it's not until the early 1990s that the gore act kicks in allows people to go straight to the internet even if you're not at a research University or a or a uh government facility you could get online and get to the internet and the internet services we just talked about America Online Prodigy comput serve gave their customers away when they dialed into those services to get to the broader internet as a whole and then in 1991 when all this is happening a new method for posting material for finding material for hopping around the internet and searching the internet and getting around and linking to other things in the internet and drilling down and seeing what you might want a new form of links and communication and posting came along as if it had burst forth into life from some Adam smash or somewhere and in fact that's what happened the internet was the creation as I said of Tim burner's Lee uh he was born born in London his parents were computer scientists and he grew up as one of those hobbyists uh like so many of the pioneers of the digital age playing in his basement with radio tubes and making early uh computers if he could and he had a fundamental insight about computers because he understood psychology very well he realized that computers were good at crunching through step by step by step of programs but but they were not good at making those random associations and clever links the way an imaginative human could a little bit like adal love life talking about here's what machines are good at here's what C humans are good at and intuitive connections and leaps uh or things that humans do and computers still haven't figured out when I smell coffee I think of the Mississippi River because I think of drinking coffee at Cafe deont it's those Association just like when uh puce character fites into the meline in uh remembrance of things past and there are all sorts of links and associations that come up with him so Tim burner's Lee exact same age as Steve Jobs uh and Bill Gates born in 1955 and he goes to Oxford uh while there at Harvard and dropping out of Reed College he's at Oxford and he's building his own computers his problem though is that Oxford was not the exact same ecosystem that Silicon Valley was they weren't Venture capitalists and all sorts of video games and Engineers it was a five 600 year old University and so when he was building his computers he couldn't really create a business like Microsoft and Apple the way his two contemporaries could when they were on the west coast of the United States one of the things that Tim burner's loved because he was a geek was a book called inquire within upon everything and it was a book from Victorian England it was sort of like an almanac it came out every couple of years and it just had everything you could possibly want to know was crammed into that book and that's from the introduction right here on the slide it says whether you wish to model a flower and wax or study the rules of etiquette or serve a Rel for breakfast or supper or plan a dinner or a party for one or cure a headache or make a will or get married bury a relative whatever you wish to do make or enjoy provided your desire has relation to the necessities of domestic life I hope you will not fail to inquire with in now with that love of both computers and an almanac geeky feel for everything he goes to Sur a particle physics laboratory in Switzerland where they do things like they discovered recently the higs bosan particle uh but it's also where Tim burner's Lee was in charge of cading and keeping track of the information in the various research projects that were there and so for CERN in October of 1980 he creates a system for keeping track of all of the information to store it to know how to follow it to know how to make links between connected projects but link said you might not think of making maybe projects that were all being funded by one group a project that all involveed physics or project maybe that involved women researches whatever you could link to various things in this system he had and of course he calls it the inquire system and it has a program called the inquire within program because he wants to make it a source for everything you might want to find he didn't create a way of storing the information using structures like decision trees or or charts or matrices he said such structures are too hierarchical and they're too rigid where the human mind makes random leaps and by the way that's why we're creative that's why we're intuitive and it says and he then said suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked a web of information would form he's on his way to creating the worldwide web uh and he wanted he said this is a quote from he said I wanted to make it so that we could work together design things together we have lots of people all over the planet and they have parts of the answer to thing they have parts of the cure for AIDS in their heads of parts of understanding cancer and if you could link them with people and they could collaborate and people who know some of the other parts that would help collate all of the world's knowledge the way he does it the way he organizes it is is something called a hyperlink now we probably don't Ponder too much about hyperlinks we use them every day you see something that's blue or underlined or marked on a web page and you click and boom you transport it somewhere else well hyperlinks were not used in the internet before that they aren't a great way to do a menu or list or hierarchical structure of information but they're a great way to do a web where you can link around to various things and every document can link to any other document and doesn't have to ask permission what does that remind you of in some ways it's like packet switching there's no hierarchy there's no structure there's no top- down organization there's no permission that authorities have to give every Place everywhere every node on the web every node on the internet has equal power to store and forward material and every document on the web has the equal power to link to to click to to have a hyperlink to any other documents and make a webike form of connections that's sort of like the web that is the backbone of a packet switched Network so here you have both of these things Bringing Down the notion of hierarchy Bringing Down the notion of organized structures and authority and allowing peer-to-peer link to link node to node hyperlink to hyperlink to be done hyperlinks were created by a really cool guy still around named Ted Nelson uh and he did it even before the worldwide web but he was much more of a purist when he did his file structure for complex and changing and indeterminate things and one of the things he did that he still thinks is right but was a fundamental mistake in his Xanadu as he called it Xanadu was the name of his program was you couldn't just Link in the other site you had to have permission to link and all the links went two ways now that has some advantages it means you know who's linking to you you can charge people if they link to some of your things but it has the disadvantage of not allowing somebody just to link whatever they want and for the whole system to grow exponentially and so the web develops the way Tim burner's lead does it at s and he creates the protocols Protocols are like the internet itself had the TCP which is the transmission control protocols and IP protocols which are the internet protocols Tim burner's Lee created additional protocols to add to that which were the hypertext transfer protocols meaning when you click a link how does it know to go out and find a server somewhere else and HTML which is the hypertex markup language that you use when you're creating a document you use HTML to put in the hypertex transfer program uh protocols and that allows the connections that at the core of the inquire Pro program and what uh Tim berners Le created for the web and it permits them to proliferate like rabbits because anybody can link to any other document on any other computer without asking anybody's permission and so soon it's exploding everybody's linking to whatever they want now s of course wanted to patent it but Tim berners Lee objected he said to one of uh his colleagues there said why would we patent it what do you want to do make money and the guy kind of paused for a second he said well that wouldn't be a bad idea would it well Tim burner Lee didn't particularly feel it was a great idea he was one of those people who wanted his inventions to be open a bit like Ben Franklin did when he does the lightning rod because the web would spread and evolve much more quickly if nobody owned it if everybody could use it if it were free and if it were open as uh one of his colleagues said Tim's not in it for the money he accepts a much wider range of hotel room facilities than the average CEO would and there's one of the tensions when you're an entrepreneur you can create something and patent it and own it and make it proprietary and try to monetize it as fast as possible and that's probably a good business model but the other business model is to let it be distributed as freely and as openly as possible and then it becomes dominant it becomes not like Ted Nelson xadoo or like gopher or sen fetch or all these other programs it becomes the one that everybody uses you may not make as much money but you put a dent in the universe you change the world and so he typed up something for CERN the uh the physics place in Switzerland to issue it said CERN relinquishes all the intellectual property rights to this code in anybody to use it and change it and modify it for any purpose they want and it becomes the grandest free and open-source project in the history of the digital Revolution and he announces it he announces it uh in the worldwide web uh in a sort of posting he does on August 6 1991 just it's not a big Grand announcement ceremony you just post something online and he says the worldwide web project aims to a links to be made to any information anywhere and he said if you want to just come here come send us a message and we'll send you all of the protocols for free it's free and open source and it was just that one sentence he posted that sentence that said any information anywhere that's a pretty amazing concept believe it or not before the web before 1991 maybe before you were born it was not possible to get any information from anywhere sometimes it was pretty hard to find information from other places and as Tim berners Lee said quote I spent a lot of time trying to make sure people could put anything on the web and then he said I had no idea that people would put literally everything on the web hey that has a familiar ring to it inquire within upon everything now you know when I was at time Inc the worldwide web comes along in 1991 and I get made in charge of New Media for time Incorporated now Time Magazine back then made deals with America Online we got paid sometimes like a million $2 million dollars a year to put all of time magazines content in the news stand for free for anybody who signed on to AOL and the way that made money is people paid to go online they paid $15 $20 a month and then you played an hourly rate the more you stayed on so there was an incentive we split the revenues AOL if somebody stayed online for two or three hours reading Time Magazine we would get a part of that so we had an incentive to put all of our material put out bulletin board sites have chat rooms with our editors so that we could keep people on AOL and AOL would make money they made it through subscribers but then in 1991 when the web came along I remember running into at uh lunch a guy Nam leis Retta who was then the founding editor of Wired Magazine so what are we going I said to what are we going to do about the web that seems like the cool place to be but you know we're on compus serve America online and uh how should we be getting onto the internet and we both decided that the way to do it was to create websites there weren't that many websites in 1994 the uh worldwide web had just started to grow and so in April of 1994 at time Inc we put up a website called Pathfinder with all of our magazines time people money and Fortune Pathfinder by the way happened to be when I was growing up in New Orleans my childhood nickname from a friend of mine who called me Pathfinder for some reason I can't remember and so I kind of quietly named the site Pathfinder and that's what it looked like back then how wir also did it they created Hotwire now when we did it it had some real great upsides we were able to put all of our information up and anywhere anyone anywhere could get it it was really cool but there were some flaws to the whole system first of all the internet was free and people then didn't pay if you put up Time Magazine so we had been getting money from America online because they had subscribers and we got money from comper when we work with them but when we put up our own website we didn't get any money from the readers and if you started to try to charge money it didn't work because then Newsweek would go and they wouldn't charge people and people would go there instead so we ended up relying totally upon advertising in the early days those big banner ads and that had a real downside to it instead of writing something of Great Value to your reader that they would want to pay for you instead kind of did clickbait or anything that would get ey balls even for a few minutes uh that you could put advertisers you could put up for advertisers and you gathered data on your readers so that you can tell the advertisers what type of uh eyeballs that they were getting and so we ended up with a business model that in my mind was so dependent on Advertising that we didn't really cater to the needs of a value uh of a reader searching for Value we catered to clickbait to getting advertising eyeballs also the web didn't have a collaborate button or an edit button you put up a website and you just dumped your content on it but people couldn't interact with it they didn't really collaborate they didn't create things on your website and so the web became a publishing tool think about that for a second publishing things as opposed to a collaboration tool this is something that gets remedied a bit with everything from Wikipedia to Facebook but early on the web was just for publishing there was also no way of knowing who was coming to your site no way of doing micro payments so theyd pay you a buck every time they got your magazine there wasn't a sense of community uh we didn't have we had comment boards uh but when we were on AOL we used to moderate them carefully to make sure it was a civil discussion once we got on to uh the web because of the nature of the web and also a law called section 23 which said that you didn't bear responsibility if people were just posting on your site that all made the notion of community which is really at the core of the online services like the well and then America Online didn't really happen so much in the web but let me quit uh saying what the flaws of the web were because 99% of what happened was totally amazing what it allowed was for anybody anywhere to share information with anybody anywhere to get whatever they want from anywhere in the world and to take their own ideas their own poems their own music their own art and distribute it anywhere in the world you could inquire within upon everything and you could submit everything you wanted to for other people to look at and boy that was a transformative technology thanks