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Tim Berners Lee is widely accredited as the inventor of the internet, but everyone ignores Robert Caillau, who arguably created the actual internet. Tim B Lee m

Tim Berners Lee is widely accredited as the inventor of the internet, but everyone ignores Robert Caillau, who arguably created the actual internet. Tim B Lee mainly created the hypertext paradigm of sending messages, and Robert worked out how to actually do it and created the concept of a browser. Anyway they both agreed at the time they had an equal share in creating 'the internet', but the media seems to have long forgotten about the non-english guy. so yeah, either TBL is too famous and in your list, or is R. Caillau not famous enough and belonging in the list from this post? Not upto me to decide, but anyway he should not be forgotten

macintux 4y ago
I can’t let that pass without the necessary pedantry: the Internet long predated either contribution.
- binarymax 4y ago
  Indeed, conflation of the web with the internet is a sticking point for me too! I'd like to shout out Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine who made TCP for ARPANET: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675
  - fanf2 4y ago
    The photo in this tweet sums it up nicely https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1204166408730361856 https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1204166408730361856
- dachryn 4y ago
  ah well indeed, slip up of mine. I meant the World Wide Web, the WWW, as we know it. The idea of using the pre-existing internet (which did in fact exist as you say it) and how to shape messages on it to create something like the www, that was their actual invention. Take something, and use it in a creative new way, is basically what they did
Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
I remember a doctor describing this effect in his field in the last century. He said many conditions, particularly mental health related where all written down by French and German doctors at the turn of the century, so this friend Doctor of mine learned the original names. But as American and British publishers started growing, they started doing a very sly thing which was, when an anglo researcher made a contribution to the understanding of that condition they would double barrel it at first. So it might have started as the Friedman psychosis, then it became the Friedman-Johns psychosis, and slowly the newer editions just had the Johns psychosis. I wonder if Caillau is but a newer victim of this seemingly very anglophilic tradition.
13of40 4y ago
The browser was a bit of an obvious invention at the time. We were cramming more and more functionality into BBS software, and rendering it into a WYSIWYG+WIMP client was a natural next step. If I'd managed to get off the couch that week, I'd be the father of "the internet". (My one was a lot more like a pdf document, though.)
chrisseaton 4y ago
> Tim Berners Lee is widely accredited as the inventor of the internet Do you mean the web? The Internet was already a thing before either of these people came along and built something on top of it.
tialaramex 4y ago
The things that stands out about Tim's toy hypertext system (the "World Wide Web") was that Tim was focused on the actual system, rather than on the academic experiment. There were researchers in that area but they felt it was important to figure out problems like link decay before you would try to deploy this at scale, Tim didn't care, it worked fine. What you've done is akin to if somebody argued that it's wrong to credit Bill Gates with inventing the computer when really that's what Steve Jobs did. It's not even the right generation. [ You can argue about whether what matters is the idea of the Analytical Engine, or one of the early realisations like the Z3, or Colossus or ENIAC or whatever. But those things were all built and (aside from the Analytical Engine) in use before Jobs or Gates were even born ]
deleted 4y ago
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macintux 4y ago

I can’t let that pass without the necessary pedantry: the Internet long predated either contribution.

binarymax 4y ago
Indeed, conflation of the web with the internet is a sticking point for me too! I'd like to shout out Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine who made TCP for ARPANET: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675
- fanf2 4y ago
  The photo in this tweet sums it up nicely https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1204166408730361856 https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1204166408730361856
dachryn 4y ago
ah well indeed, slip up of mine. I meant the World Wide Web, the WWW, as we know it. The idea of using the pre-existing internet (which did in fact exist as you say it) and how to shape messages on it to create something like the www, that was their actual invention. Take something, and use it in a creative new way, is basically what they did

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago

I remember a doctor describing this effect in his field in the last century. He said many conditions, particularly mental health related where all written down by French and German doctors at the turn of the century, so this friend Doctor of mine learned the original names. But as American and British publishers started growing, they started doing a very sly thing which was, when an anglo researcher made a contribution to the understanding of that condition they would double barrel it at first. So it might have started as the Friedman psychosis, then it became the Friedman-Johns psychosis, and slowly the newer editions just had the Johns psychosis. I wonder if Caillau is but a newer victim of this seemingly very anglophilic tradition.

13of40 4y ago

The browser was a bit of an obvious invention at the time. We were cramming more and more functionality into BBS software, and rendering it into a WYSIWYG+WIMP client was a natural next step. If I'd managed to get off the couch that week, I'd be the father of "the internet". (My one was a lot more like a pdf document, though.)

chrisseaton 4y ago

> Tim Berners Lee is widely accredited as the inventor of the internet Do you mean the web? The Internet was already a thing before either of these people came along and built something on top of it.

tialaramex 4y ago

The things that stands out about Tim's toy hypertext system (the "World Wide Web") was that Tim was focused on the actual system, rather than on the academic experiment. There were researchers in that area but they felt it was important to figure out problems like link decay before you would try to deploy this at scale, Tim didn't care, it worked fine. What you've done is akin to if somebody argued that it's wrong to credit Bill Gates with inventing the computer when really that's what Steve Jobs did. It's not even the right generation. [ You can argue about whether what matters is the idea of the Analytical Engine, or one of the early realisations like the Z3, or Colossus or ENIAC or whatever. But those things were all built and (aside from the Analytical Engine) in use before Jobs or Gates were even born ]

deleted 4y ago

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