

Online appeal unearths historic web page - c-oreills
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22652675

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Create
just for the record and to please the prospective downvoting mob, here is a
warning to any non-westerner members:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices
in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value
of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 <http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264>

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 equivalents.

Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it
work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. a universal 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.

