What if, Tim?

Posted by Giselle on September 24, 2008

The World Wide Web or the web as we know it, is a medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. It is often used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is only a service that operates on the Internet just like e-mail does. If Tim Berners-Lee had decided to patent his idea in 1989, the Internet would be so much different now. The Internet has many creators namely,Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. They came up with a system to let different computer networks interconnect and communicate. Ray Tomlinson, is the creator of e-mail and the “@” symbol while Ted Nelson, coined the term hypertext and many others. But only one person conceptualized the World Wide Web. In fact, Berners-Lee first called it a “mesh”, before changing it to a “web”. Because he and Robert Cailliau, insisted on a license-free technology, today a Gateway computer operating on a Linux and a browser made by Netscape can see the same Web page as any other personal computers would. If his employer CERN sought royalties, the world would have 16 different “Webs” on the Internet today.

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