BF2S Forums How old is the Internet?

Bertster7 wrote:

mikkel wrote:

Bertster7 wrote:

No. That's utter nonsense. It is most certainly not the other way around.

ARPANET was funded by the US military and made by academics at universities across the US. This provided the networking fundamentals (such as TCP/IP, in the later stages) which todays Internet is built on. Tim Berners Lee invented the whole idea of hypertext - which is what drives the web.

Hypertext in its first developed form was around when this guy was around 10 years old, and the concept is much older. He just took the concept of interlinked documents, and moved it from local resources to remote resources. Not a hugely insightful application, really.

Not in the sort of forms we recognise today it wasn't. The general concept of hypertext has been around for about a century. Complex interlinked hypertext was something Berners Lee was certainly the single biggest driving force behind - and that's before you get into the concept of distibuting the accessible data over a whole load of networked nodes (his idea). You should bear in mind that it was he who developed ENQUIRE - which did a lot for hypertext, long before the advent of the web.

When I said hypertext earlier, I was in fact refering to the forms we most commonly see it in today - the most prolific being HTML (which Berners Lee developed much of). To understate his role in the development of the Internet as we see it today is foolish, because there is no other single person more responsible for the Internet we have now being the way it is.

His new visions of the Semantic web look like they could revolutionise the way we search for data too. I'm keenly following developments in that.

Last edited by mikkel (2008-11-21 12:42:07)

Bertster7 wrote:

mikkel wrote:

Bertster7 wrote:

Not in the sort of forms we recognise today it wasn't. The general concept of hypertext has been around for about a century. Complex interlinked hypertext was something Berners Lee was certainly the single biggest driving force behind - and that's before you get into the concept of distibuting the accessible data over a whole load of networked nodes (his idea). You should bear in mind that it was he who developed ENQUIRE - which did a lot for hypertext, long before the advent of the web.

When I said hypertext earlier, I was in fact refering to the forms we most commonly see it in today - the most prolific being HTML (which Berners Lee developed much of). To understate his role in the development of the Internet as we see it today is foolish, because there is no other single person more responsible for the Internet we have now being the way it is.

His new visions of the Semantic web look like they could revolutionise the way we search for data too. I'm keenly following developments in that.

I'm not saying that his developments didn't contribute to the beginnings of the Internet. I'm saying that he didn't invent "the whole idea of hypertext", and that his work on hypertext was more developmental than innovative.

Did he or did he not come up with the idea of a non-centralised network with data distributed across a number of nodes with that data accessible through hypertext linking it all together and used to navigate between nodes and within the directories those nodes contain?