Web Inventors - Bush & Berners-Lee

Week 6LCC 2700: Intro to Computational MediaFall 2005Ian Bogost

Vannevar Bush

• Born in 1890• Taught at MIT and built an analog computer for

differential equations.• Became Chairman of the National Defense

Research Committee• Worked on the Manhattan Project, and helped

to found the National Science Foundation• Disliked the humanities and social sciences, and

consequentially did not have a historical understanding of his Memex.

“As we may think” (1945)

• Expansion in human knowledge

• No way to navigate the fruits of print culture

• Memex machine– Based on microfiche,

not digital– Architecture of

associated trails, forged by experts

Bush was a leader of military research during WWII, and an architect of the post-war military-industrial-university research establishment

Bush’s Proposed Memex (1945)

Bush’s Trail is a series of links(this passage is also quoted by Nelson)When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts

the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. ... The user taps a single key, and these items are permanently joined. …

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button …. Moreover when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed…exactly as though the physical items had been…bound together…more than this, for any item can be joined to numerous trails.

Idea of the Trail, Trail-blazer

• Connected to American culture: exploration of the frontier a defining experience and myth

• Google’s success based on weighing links, calculating authority of the pointer

• Participatory nature of the digital medium supports multiple trail-blazers, criss-crossing, interconnnected trails

• Network architecture supports multiple routes• Need for new indexing, segmenting, and linking

structures to fully implement this concept

The Legacy of Bush

Voice Recognition

Head Mounted Camera

My Life’s Bits:http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx

Ted Nelson: Hypertext (1965)

• “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing , and the Indeterminate”

• Wedded V. Bush’s memex to digital technology, calling for digital associationist encyclopedic information resource

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee

• Born in England in 1955 • Banned from using Oxford

Computer after being caught hacking

• Built a computer from an old television and an M6800 processor

• Began working at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics lab

• Built a prototype of the WWW called Enquire in 1980

Launching the Web

• First web page created in 1991• Poster at the ACM Hypertext

conference• There were already other

methods of sharing information– Gopher– BBS

• First web page:• http://www.w3.org/History/199

21103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/News/9201.html

Berners-Lee quote:

• “I didn't invent the hypertext link either. The idea of jumping from one document to another had been thought about lots of people, including Vanevar Bush in 1945, and by Ted Nelson (who actually invented the word hypertext). Bush did it before computers really existed. Ted thought of a system but didn't use the internet. Doug Engelbart in the 1960's made a great system just like WWW except that it just ran on one [big] computer, as the internet hadn't been invented yet. Lots of hypertext systems had been made which just worked on one computer, and didn't link all the way across the world.

• I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World Wide Web.”

What does the World Wide Web consist of?

• Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) are the names that represents the address of the server

• HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the system used to send data between the client and the server. It can encompass a wide range of data types.

• HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the structure of rules that encompass the data of a web document. This consists of tags such as:– <html> to represent the language that is being used– <a href> an anchor to another document– <img src>a method of inserting an image into the

document

Why did the Web Win?

• There were many different systems available for use

• Patent and Royalty free system• Easy to Use• Easy to Create• World Wide Web Consortium

W3C.org· Founded in 1994· Jointly administered from Boston, Japan, and France· Has offices all over the world· Creates standards and guidelines to be used by the web· In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most

fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. W3C refers to this goal as “Web interoperability.” By publishing open (non-proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to avoid market fragmentation and thus Web fragmentation.

· Outside corporations develop other software that does not always follow these guidelines. (ie. Internet Explorer)

From Yesterday to Now

•Pioneers of the web helped to establish its directionhttp://web.archive.org/collections/pioneers.html•528 Million can view Flash animation content•136 Million Americans use the internet – over half own high speed connections

The Semantic Web

• Intends to give meaning to the content of the web

• Machine to understand the information that it is presenting and make associations and connections with it

• Uses several different mark up languages for users to create their own meta language.

An Example of the Semantic Web

• BY MIGUEL SALMERON At the doctor's office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser. The agent promptly retrieved information about Mom's prescribed treatment from the doctor's agent, looked up several lists of providers, and checked for the ones in-plan for Mom's insurance within a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating of excellent or very good on trusted rating services. It then began trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete's and Lucy's busy schedules. (The emphasized keywords indicate terms whose semantics, or meaning, were defined for the agent through the Semantic Web.)

The Web’s Future

•Is a lack of hierarchy good?•Will the web become a huge shopping mall or a library?•What do people want from ubiquitous connections to the web?

•http://www.idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/