Confirming the exact location of the invention of the web (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Confirming the exact location of the invention of the web (2010)

davidgalbraith.org

32 pointsTomte19 comments

Sure, I am French, I've visited CERN, so I know a good chunk of it is in France. Yet it didn't occur to me that the web was invented in France. But to be honest I didn't think it was invented in Switzerland either.

CERN is like the ISS to me, it's its own world, not really in a country. Most people working there aren't French. Tim Berners Lee is not French.

And really who cares?

Now that it's out of the box, you'll hear people say "we" invented the web. We already invented the minitel, let's keep it at that...

Technically correct. The best kind of correct.

Tim Berners-Lee's office was in a building that was technically just inside France, as CERN straddles the border.

At least it wasn't invented in Basel, then we would be wondering if the web was invented in France, Germany, or Switzerland.

As an aside, people forget how scifi France was and, to a certain extent, still is. Jules Verne was French. Paris is/was "the city of lights" because the French were early adopters of electricity. Descartes, Lavoisier, Fourier... Even the Maginot line was a high-tech approach to national defense, and the French were willing to give it a shot. I'm actually surprised that France hasn't done much, much more to foster high-tech startups. Imagine if they made some reasonable Paris suburb a free economic zone!

A tiny blip of history, state companies did impede some evolution, France Telecom wanted to ensure use of their system (x25 ? x500 .. I forgot) meanwhile TCP was growing in the US. Sometimes large public companies are great, sometimes a bit less so.

Nevertheless in 1980 the France Telecom (called PTT at the time) brought the highly successful Minitel system to life - basically a text mode WWW running over phone lines.

I’m not sure what the extend of the delay really is, maybe in the 90s it could be felt but since the 2000’s, it seems like France’s internet is always pretty fast and cheap and available across the country.

How I see it, network teachers who told this story, said it as a missed technological leadership opportunity. They had lots of skills but the structure made networking lag just a bit too long.

Tim Berners-Lee Confirms The Exact Location Where the Web Was Invented: France - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3512069 - Jan 2012 (27 comments)

Tim Berners-Lee on the exact location where the web was invented - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1497525 - July 2010 (1 comment)

It's in many way ironic that the Web was "technically" born in France, which was also the home of the Minitel, which probably slowed down adoption for the Web/internet access due to how popular it was (in France).

I wonder at what point "The Web" was invented. When the first "GET / HTTP/0.1" (what version did tbl use?) got a proper response? I guess he wrote HTML after being able to fetch text streams, is it "The Web" without HTML parsing and links that you can navigate to?

That's a good question - the term "web" is vague. Are we talking about the internet or are we talking about the HTTP protocol and HTML markup? Those two technologies have very different histories.

Since 'Web' refers to a web of links between pages, I would personally side on the combination of HTTP with HTML, but your point is well taken.

There's also the choice between whether 'invented' refers to the moment when a new technology first becomes usable, or whether 'invented' refers to the moment when a new technology is first used: was the web invented when a client and server were both setup and capable of communicating? or, when a client and server were first used to communicate? Only a difference of minutes, probably, but potentially significant.

> the first "GET / HTTP/0.1" (what version did tbl use?)

Apparently it was HTTP/0.9.

> In 1991, the first documented official version of HTTP was written as a plain document, less than 700 words long, and this version was named HTTP/0.9. [It] supported only GET method.

The Original HTTP as defined in 1991 - https://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html

The first "web server" went live in 1990 - and here's the source!

TCP/IP based server for HyperText "2 Oct 90 - Written TBL" - https://www.w3.org/Daemon/old/V0.1/daemon.c

It was invented on a NeXT computer, squarely in American cyber and thought space. Just like freedom fries.

Lovely article. As an aside (and I'll say this until I'm blue in the face), it always jars me when a site hijacks default browser scrolling functionality.

Unfortunately, this website has an issue with scrolling

Url changed from https://kottke.org/12/01/the-web-was-invented-in-france-not-..., which points to this.

This is the most french headline

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