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It's ironic that you write this comment on the World Wide Web. An invention made in the "useless for humanity" CERN... :-/ https://home.cern/science/computing/

by kensai 4y ago

It's ironic that you write this comment on the World Wide Web. An invention made in the "useless for humanity" CERN... :-/ https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

orhmeh09 4y ago
I have no doubt we’d have gotten basically the same thing within five years from elsewhere if CERN didn’t exist.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Gopher came slightly after WWW, so I'm not sure how much influence WWW had on it, but it makes me think you're right. Other people were working in the problem space.
  - kensai 4y ago
    It came because it was somewhere inspired. WWW was the initial spark. And it could have only come in some big time, blue sky lab.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Gopher came first. Berners-Lee used gopher while we was developing WWW. https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol/ https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph... But it doesn't matter. Lots of people all over the world were collaborating to build new Internet protocols.
dehrmann 4y ago
It's not, though. > There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments. $1M is a reasonable amount to build a prototype world wide web. There were 5,000 things like WWW we didn't do because we built LHC.
dekhn 4y ago
folks were already putting postscript papers on FTP servers. Discoverability (linking) was the big hard problem.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  > Discoverability (linking) was the big hard problem. Still is.
Barrin92 4y ago
the WWW had nothing to do with physics research in particular but with the need to document and exchange information across systems which was a secular trend. Hypertext as a user interface paradigm existed before the WWW. (Douglas Engelbart's NLS for example)
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
Was that part of an accelerator? Or one of the detectors? No, it was completely unrelated work of someone who happened to also be at CERN.

by kensai 4y ago

orhmeh09 4y ago

I have no doubt we’d have gotten basically the same thing within five years from elsewhere if CERN didn’t exist.

dehrmann 4y ago
Gopher came slightly after WWW, so I'm not sure how much influence WWW had on it, but it makes me think you're right. Other people were working in the problem space.
- kensai 4y ago
  It came because it was somewhere inspired. WWW was the initial spark. And it could have only come in some big time, blue sky lab.
- lupire 4y ago
  Gopher came first. Berners-Lee used gopher while we was developing WWW. https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol/ https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph... But it doesn't matter. Lots of people all over the world were collaborating to build new Internet protocols.

dehrmann 4y ago

It's not, though. > There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments. $1M is a reasonable amount to build a prototype world wide web. There were 5,000 things like WWW we didn't do because we built LHC.

dekhn 4y ago

folks were already putting postscript papers on FTP servers. Discoverability (linking) was the big hard problem.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
> Discoverability (linking) was the big hard problem. Still is.

Barrin92 4y ago

the WWW had nothing to do with physics research in particular but with the need to document and exchange information across systems which was a secular trend. Hypertext as a user interface paradigm existed before the WWW. (Douglas Engelbart's NLS for example)

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

Was that part of an accelerator? Or one of the detectors? No, it was completely unrelated work of someone who happened to also be at CERN.