When Tim Berners-Lee invented the computer code that led to the creation of the World Wide Web in 1990, he did not try to patent or charge fees for the use of his technology.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Britain helped create the Internet - Tim Berners Lee created the World Wide Web, one of a long line of British scientists who have given us an outsized role in shaping our own digital future.
Tim Berners-Lee, the 44-year-old English physicist who created the World Wide Web, is precisely the kind of hero that a relatively simple invention with profound social and economic consequences should lay claim to. He is not just creative but democratic, diplomatic, polite and generous with credit and praise.
Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web as a set of protocols for transferring, linking and addressing documents to send over the Net. Without the global reach and open technical standards of the Internet, the Web could never have proliferated as it did.
The story of the Web starts in 1980, when Berners-Lee, a young consulting physicist at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, grew frustrated with existing methods for finding and transferring information.
Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn't understand that the internet was the direction computing was going.
The promise of the early web was that everyone could have a website but there was something missing. Maybe the technology wasn't ready.
The Web is actually a coming together of three technologies, if you like: the hypertext, the personal computer, and the network. So, the network we had, and the personal computers were there, but people didn't use them, because they didn't know what to use them for, except maybe for a few games.
Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.
At one point, CERN was toying with patenting the World Wide Web.
The young Steve Jobs had a hard time articulating something that didn't exist. He could see it, taste it, knew what it felt like, but he didn't have all the language because it hadn't been invented yet. People didn't fathom the personal computer on a mass produced level.
No opposing quotes found.