And the (ACM) Award Goes To...
Congratulations to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the latest recipient[1] of the ACM Turing award. Purists may scoff[2], but in terms of producing something tangible that pushes forward the boundaries of technology and turns out to be a great social leveler, its hard to think of a more deserving receiver of this accolade. Berners-Lee is not a practitioner of pure computer science in the same vein as a Codd, Hoare or Milner, to name three previous Turing awardees (who also happen to be - or were - his compatriots). His background is Physics, and he was doing physics at CERN at the time the first web servers came online. So the Web was essentially a product of applied computing, building on several ideas[3][4][5], and its refreshing that the ACM are willing to recognize such a contribution, in addition to more fundamentally theoretical ones.
Berners-Lee is described as as the "Inventor" of the World Wide Web in the ACM's announcment[6]. There's something quaint about the term 'inventor'. Not commonly used in modern technical language (except perhaps for patents), it feels like a throwback to a previous age. In this sense, perhaps Berners-Lee's achievements are closer in spirit to those of an Edison or a Tesla, than to his previously named compatriots. In terms of personal impact, here's my "where were you when..." story on first encountering the web; I was in grad school, in the early 90s, and at that time academia was a heavy user of the internet (probably the most so). The tools of the day were ftp, gopher and wais, news, telnet and others I no longer recall, all requiring rudimentary computer skills to use, yet different in each case. At some point, possibly around early '93, the web became impossible to ignore. I remember going to a talk entitled "mosaic - is this the coolest program ever?", and before long our research group had put up a web server and we were tinkering with personal web-sites, and it became clear this was a seismic shift. A unifying, simple to use interface to the internet. Point and click instead of arcane and cryptic command line protocol syntax. A brilliant invention!
Like all brilliant inventions, the web has taken on a life beyond its creator's vision; I'm not sure if Berners-Lee had in mind that the web would become the underpinning communication mechanism between (and within) today's internet-facing systems, but with the ubiquity of APIs built on the Web, and in particular the work of Roy Fielding[7], it has become the de facto way for software systems, as well as humans, to communicate on the internet. Not immune to criticism[8], it has nonetheless enabled services and infrastructure that are genuinely planet-scale.
This is also a timely announcement, particularly given the recent decision in the US to enable ISPs to harvest customer data[9], never mind that the various search and social media data trails we leave have long been put to work by their seemingly benign enablers[10][11][12]. All of which serves only to exacerbate the feeling that the internet has become corporatized to the extent that to partake in daily life there is no choice but to be on it, yet to do so is to merely be a sitting duck for whoever wants your data. In short, a darkening, capitalist dystopia. Berners-Lee, to his credit, never hesitates to speak out[13] on where it has gone wrong and how it can be made better. So lets all celebrate the original democratizing spirit of the web and follow his lead in demanding change, and changing it for the better.
Berners-Lee is described as as the "Inventor" of the World Wide Web in the ACM's announcment[6]. There's something quaint about the term 'inventor'. Not commonly used in modern technical language (except perhaps for patents), it feels like a throwback to a previous age. In this sense, perhaps Berners-Lee's achievements are closer in spirit to those of an Edison or a Tesla, than to his previously named compatriots. In terms of personal impact, here's my "where were you when..." story on first encountering the web; I was in grad school, in the early 90s, and at that time academia was a heavy user of the internet (probably the most so). The tools of the day were ftp, gopher and wais, news, telnet and others I no longer recall, all requiring rudimentary computer skills to use, yet different in each case. At some point, possibly around early '93, the web became impossible to ignore. I remember going to a talk entitled "mosaic - is this the coolest program ever?", and before long our research group had put up a web server and we were tinkering with personal web-sites, and it became clear this was a seismic shift. A unifying, simple to use interface to the internet. Point and click instead of arcane and cryptic command line protocol syntax. A brilliant invention!
Like all brilliant inventions, the web has taken on a life beyond its creator's vision; I'm not sure if Berners-Lee had in mind that the web would become the underpinning communication mechanism between (and within) today's internet-facing systems, but with the ubiquity of APIs built on the Web, and in particular the work of Roy Fielding[7], it has become the de facto way for software systems, as well as humans, to communicate on the internet. Not immune to criticism[8], it has nonetheless enabled services and infrastructure that are genuinely planet-scale.
This is also a timely announcement, particularly given the recent decision in the US to enable ISPs to harvest customer data[9], never mind that the various search and social media data trails we leave have long been put to work by their seemingly benign enablers[10][11][12]. All of which serves only to exacerbate the feeling that the internet has become corporatized to the extent that to partake in daily life there is no choice but to be on it, yet to do so is to merely be a sitting duck for whoever wants your data. In short, a darkening, capitalist dystopia. Berners-Lee, to his credit, never hesitates to speak out[13] on where it has gone wrong and how it can be made better. So lets all celebrate the original democratizing spirit of the web and follow his lead in demanding change, and changing it for the better.
posted by Colm McHugh at 1:19 PM
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