Comment by computator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by computator | Hacker News Reader

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> Alas it happens all the time.

In the field of computing, I think the greatest contribution to the world vs least fame & fortune goes to the inventor of the World Wide Web.

It's sad that outside of the computing world, Tim Berners-Lee is unknown. Asking your dentist, aunt, or barber about who they think invented the web leads to some amusing replies.

I've actually done this and after telling them about Berners-Lee, I found the following themes to be common:

(1) Incredulousness that it was one person. People either think it had to be a big company or that it somehow "evolved" into existence (you know, the way television or photography just kind of happened without any particular persons being involved /irony).

(2) Belief that he chose to not accept the money. That is, he could have made a fortune if he wanted to, but for unspecified reasons he didn't want the money. I've tried to explain that the web wouldn't have succeeded if he tried to charge for it (even assuming that CERN let him charge for it), but there's a popular belief that great work always gets rewarded unless one explicitly opts out of the reward.

AN ASIDE: I think that in all human endeavor, the record for greatest contribution to the world vs least fame & fortune, where the inventor is truly known, should go to Cai Lun (also spelt Ts'ai Lun), the inventor of paper. He's a real person and historically well-documented as the actual inventor of paper:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_Lun

What's even more a shame is that many people in the computer industry don't respect TBL's invention and accomplishments either!

I'll borrow a phrase from Paul Graham and call it the "middlebrow critique" of the web. Typically people think the design is naive and inefficient -- they think it should involve a stateful protocol, a turing-complete VM, or be more "statically typed". They also tend to believe in "global truth" and neglect backward compatibility / graceful upgrades.

I've heard a variety of accomplished engineers -- including my coworkers at Google, whose riches were built on the web -- express these kinds of sentiments.

I think the real disconnect is that TBL thinks about people just as much as he thinks about computers. He thinks about the ecosystem -- the whole rather than the parts. The inventions and design principles were not an accident; you can read about them in his book "Weaving the Web".

The whole stateful/stateless choice isn't intuitive unless you've at least read discussions about a few protocol designs/implementations which made these choices. It isn't about intelligence.

No wait, I might be wrong here -- this ought to be obvious for people so young that they grew up doing web programming? Do educated developers really say that?

(I haven't followed the rfcs for quite a long time, so I probably do lots Dunning–Krugers myself now. :-) )

Edit: I remember when WWW took over from Gopher. I thought "Damn, a superior alternative that won't win because a first-come implementation already filled the niche." Then came Mosaic which could show pictures -- and WWW took over. I was happy and disgusted at the shallowness. :-)

One of my favorite Internet artifacts is Marc Andreessen's proposal for the IMG tag -- note he used all caps.

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...

Tim has received many, many honors. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awards_and_honours_presented_t...

There was a large amount of right place/right time to what he did. It wouldn't have been possible without the Internet infrastructure. He didn't invent networking or hypertext.

All that's true, but it doesn't contradict the basic point: Tim Berners-Lee has one of the greatest contribution to least fame & fortune ratios in the field of computing.

> Tim has received many, many honors.

The average person uses the web all the time but has never heard of Tim Berners-Lee or any of the awards you mention. But they know who won the Oscar for a movie they watched for 90 minutes.

> There was a large amount of right place/right time to what he did.

That's also true of (for example) Bill Gates, but he made a massive fortune and is well-known by the public.

> He didn't invent networking or hypertext.

You can make that kind of comment about everything ever invented in human history. Everyone builds on top of something.

Engelbart demoed hypertext in the 60s. There are many underappreciated people in history, but TBL is not one of them.

> The average person uses the web all the time but has never heard of Tim Berners-Lee

He was in the opening ceremony of the last olympics, right alongside the pop stars. I don't think any other computer scientist has ever been honoured in such a public, pop-culture way.

Working on an actual NeXTCube as well. Now that's attention to detail!

http://i.imgur.com/8KxqM.gif

And how did the presenters introduce him (at least on the US broadcast)? "I have no idea who this guy is."

> The average person uses the web all the time but has never heard of Tim Berners-Lee or any of the awards you mention. But they know who won the Oscar for a movie they watched for 90 minutes.

Then I ask: Does the typical user of a mobile phone know who invented the frequency hopping that is used in modern mobile network standards (hint: it was an actress): https://goo.gl/fVYYbY

The same could be said of about lots of other major technical inventions.

https://goo.gl/fVYYbY -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

>Incredulousness that it was one person. People either think it had to be a big company or that it somehow "evolved" into existence

I think this is just because most people don't understand what the "world wide web" is. They think it's synonymous with "internet", and so are understandably incredulous.

> In the field of computing, I think the greatest contribution to the world vs least fame & fortune goes to the inventor of the World Wide Web.

See also Clifford Cocks.

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