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...
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...