Sir Tim Berners-Lee Stars in Olympic Opening Ceremony

Also a wonder of the modern world: He got phone reception in that heavily crowded stadium.

They used Archimedes at CERN? Truly one of the greatest computers of all time.

The actual computer he used to create the web was a Next Cube, so that was more historically accurate.

I don't think that's just a UK problem...

That's why Danny Boyle did such a good job. If the British media had been in charge of the ceremony in could have very easily been a cringeworthy ordeal featuring a cast of z-list celebrities dancing about. The inclusion of Tim Berners-Lee and the NHS section were excellent ideas.

I noticed that too. As the house was lifting, I pointed out that the computer should be a next cube. If not, they did it wrong.

> I mean, who doesn't know who that lady on the umbrella, flying out of the sky is (for example)?

I actually wonder how many people under 20 know this.

Me too, honestly I'm more interested in watching the NeXTCube than watching the rest of the Olympics.

Both men applied their intellect to substantially improve the standard of living for the rest of mankind.

The parallel is their fame. Brunel didn't build the industrial world on his own any-more than TBL built the interweb on his own. Its just good to have heroes.

The first, a combination of incompetence (e.g. forgetting they'd have to pay VAT) and corruption. The latter: by getting into debt, that now necessitates cuts to the very things being celebrated, e.g. the NHS.

We spend more on interest on government debt in the UK than we do on defence.

Maybe it has something to do with cost overrun that professor Bent Flyvbjerg researches.

Basically he says that budget estimations are prone to a cognitive fallacy by those with planning powers.

EDIT: added "estimations"

Last time London hosted the Olympics was post-war 1948, on a budget of less than a million pounds (I'm not sure if that figure is adjusted for modern currency or not, but either way it's not much money) - they didn't even build any new buildings for it.

Most big projects of this nature come in over budget. The reason is the incentives of the politicians coming up with budget estimates.

If they come up with a realistic (high) estimate, the project doesn't get done. That's a political loss - their cronies don't get paid, and they don't get to put their name on a big project. If they come up with an unrealistically low estimate, their cronies get paid and they rarely get voted out of office.

Wow, what? How do you even spend 9.3 billion pounds? Did they hire a million people for 10K?

Thanks for the link but it doesn't appear it's available to my country.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

> 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/

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.

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.

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

> Um, no, he invented the web.

I know that. It seems fewer and fewer others do.

Also, condescension works incredibly badly when you clearly did not read what you were responding to.

To some extent. While things like e-mail are getting harder for non-experts to distinguish from web content, I think many kids understand that World of Warcraft isn't the web.