
The birth of the web - Amorymeltzer
http://home.cern/topics/birth-web
======
frik
Browsing an old web page there, I found that many links contain a dot.

example.com./index.htm

(the dot after com)

check the links there:
[http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html](http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html)

~~~
ninov
That's actually the complete form of a FQDN (full qualified domain name):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_qualified_domain_name#Sy...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_qualified_domain_name#Syntax)

------
chmike
A colleague who was present at a seminar given by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN to
present the WWW told me that one person in the audience asked what could it be
used for !

From my perspective it is the Mosaic application from NCSA that is really
responsible of the success of the web. Unfortunately the people behind it
don't get the deserved recognition.

~~~
Create
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 a graphical
workstation, and not spread world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive
toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around --
certainly not "western equivalent" eastern europeans.

Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it
work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. a universally 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 to learn more about CERN, if you feel to downvote.

Basically he took the spirit of the times and attributed it to himself, with
the helping hands of the cern pr department. Now such success stories can be
used for recruitment purposes.

Long PR story short: RPC was prevalent, that is how you control(led) your
stuff remotely and they put the gopher link address ptr in the reserved field
of the text font properties (where things like bold and italics properties are
stored). Would the "web" have just ran on NeXT, it would be long extinct, let
alone take off. Clicking on text is how you used Oberon or even Genera
Document Examiner (perhaps even over the network).

On linking and hypertext: all post-war era stuff is spin. The real stuff comes
from Belgium:

For ADD-ers:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwRN5m64I7Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwRN5m64I7Y)

The story:
[http://www.archive.org/details/paulotlet](http://www.archive.org/details/paulotlet)

h[http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/forgotten_forefather_paul...](http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/forgotten_forefather_paul_otlet)

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years
in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified
to find other possibilities?" \-- H. Schopper

Potential missing staff in some areas is a separate issue, and educational
programmes are not designed to make up for it. On-the-job learning and
training are not separated but dynamically linked together, benefiting to both
parties. In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases
where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even
conflicting.

[http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-
stud...](http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-students-and-
fellows-missing-staff)

Resolution of the Staff Council

\- the Management does not propose to align the level of basic CERN salaries
with those chosen as the basis for comparison;

\- in the new career system a large fraction of the staff will have their
advancement prospects, and consequently the level of their pension, reduced
with respect to the current MARS system;

\- the overall reduction of the advancement budget will have a negative impact
on the contributions to the CERN Health Insurance System (CHIS);

[http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2015/46/Staff%20Asso...](http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2015/46/Staff%20Association/2063669?ln=en)

The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a
junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass
Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers,
including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior"
positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely
to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West
Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle
physicists.

Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision
about the possibility of pursuing a career at CERN.

This lack of an element of social responsibility in the contract policy is
unacceptable. Rather than serve as a cushion of laziness for supervisors, who
often have only a limited and utilitarian view when defining the opening of an
IC post, the contract policy must ensure the inclusion of an element of social
justice, which is cruelly absent today.

[http://staff-
association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-...](http://staff-
association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-contract-policy)

Pensions which will be applicable to new recruits as of 1 January 2012; the
Management and CERN Council adopted without any concertation and decided in
June 2011 to adopt very unfavourable mesures for new recruits.

[http://www.gac-
epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin...](http://www.gac-
epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin42-en.html)

precarity at CERN, aka cheap disposable temp labour w/o healthcare:
[http://www.tdg.ch/geneve/actu-genevoise/suisse-prete-
aider-e...](http://www.tdg.ch/geneve/actu-genevoise/suisse-prete-aider-
employes-detaches-cern/story/15383927)

Given that cheap and disposable trainees — PhD students and postdocs — fuel
the entire scientific research enterprise, it is not surprising that few
inside the system seem interested in change. A system complicit in this sort
of exploitation is at best indifferent and at worst cruel.

~~~
noblethrasher
This “Tech Talk”, [http://youtu.be/72nfrhXroo8](http://youtu.be/72nfrhXroo8),
covers some of what you're talking about, especially with regard to Otlet’s
contributions. People should also checkout Ted Nelson’s “Computer of Cynics”
series on YouTube.

------
brudgers
I remember trying the Line Browser via terminals in UF's education library
several times in 1994. I was completely unimpressed by the web. I was an early
non-adopter. The rest is history.

