The Devil Is Innocent. The WWW Is the Father of All Lies, Including Fake News and Other Fictional History!

There was recently a question on Quora about why the US invented most of the technological achievements of the 20th century. One answer listed  a range of key inventions not done by the US, of which one was the invention attributed to the UK, of the WorldWideWeb (WWW) by Lord Tim Berner-Lees.

My ire was raised because my partial involvement with the people whose efforts collectively brought the WWW into operation did not mention Berner-Lees, but instead concentrated on Douglas Engelbart a US computer specialist who postulated groupware, the VDU, the mouse, the light pen, the GUI, hpertext, and the universal resource locator (URL). More importantly, Engelbart lead the teams that actually produced those items individually, but also the Alto desktop computer that embodied them and led to the Macintosh and Windows. 

But all I  have read of Berner-Lees, he gave only a passing reference to Engelbart, and generally lied through his teeth. He was a great computer scientist, but he was also a typical self-centred human.

While he is also best known for inventing the WWW (and nominated by Time as one of the 20th century greats, it is something he never did, but has never denied the honour.

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The following is the complete comment to the Quora comment I wrote in July 2023, but could not entirely submit due to its length (a comment I could make here about the Quora moderators  I have restrained from inserting). The I entry is (mainly) as follows).

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Tim Berners-Lees invented the WWW? 

Only in his dreams.

And it was his dream for many years. But he can be most charitably described as a Henry Ford (or a Stanley, perhaps) of distributed computing that became part of the WWW. He was working at CERN as a computer scientist, when he cobbled together a network system (that we would now describe as an intranet or groupware) that used Nelson’s Xanadu concepts of hypertext and hypermedia, but spread over multiple separate computers.

Nelson's hypertext vision was first proposed in 1963 but never released as a workable product, and was conceptually different in operation to the WWW. Berner-Lees’ initial implementation was a different product to the concept that leaked out of the US in the early 1990s as the WWW, but had no obvious affect on the WWW's evolution.

I would propose Douglas Engelbart as the “Father of the WWW”, even though many other people contributed components and ideas to its evolution over a half-century. But Engelbart's ideas seemed to be a source of them.

I first heard of hypertext (which many consider one of the original idea behind the WWW) in a 1984/5 article published in Macworld, discussing the ideas of Douglas Engelbart (the person behind the VDU, mouse, the GUI, the Alto - forerunner to the Macintosh, and groupware) and Ted Nelson, a sociologist who supposedly coined the terms, hypertext and hypermedia. While the article referred to both concepts as hypertext, they were different: Engelbart’s was based on using text items spread over multiple distant systems, (with different authors at each system) while Nelson’s was concerned with multi-media components stored on a single mainframe system.

(I much later found out that only Engelbart’s ideas had actually been successfully demonstrated in 1968 and 1972.)

In March 1985, a computer and communications consultant from Melbourne, Tony Smith, with a small group of engineers and computer scientists based in Melbourne and Sydney, contacted Douglas Engelbart in Cupertino and asked permission to port his hypertext product to Unix. Engelbart agreed and and provided a number of papers on the issue as well as agreeing to provide support.

I next contacted Smith in 1989 on another matter, and asked about this hypertext project. He simply sad that the information from Engelbart had been distributed to a number of institutions worldwide.

In early 1995, I was introduced to the WWW and Netscape 1;1, as well as the all-important URL (uniform resource locator) that was then attributed to Engelbart.

I managed to track Netscape Navigator back to the University of Kansas' Lynx, a hypertext browser developed in 1992,. Whether it took anything from the Gopher browser invented the previous year is moot, although this was supposed to browse “Gopherspace” within the University that used it. I assumed this might have been related to the dissemination by Smith and friends.

Interestingly the URL term and format is generally attributed as an invention of Berners-Lee in 1994. Even more interesting is that he disliked the format, but offered no reason for is choice.

I think the WWW had hundreds of parents, and no single person could be considered the “father.” But I also consider that the release of Engelbart’s documentation to the university computing facilities worldwide contributed to the current open-source structure of the WWW, in spite of Microsoft’s efforts.

To me, Engelbart is the Father of the WWW, but many spread his seed.

Preachy offence-takers, the wowsers of our time

By Chris Kenny 

"THE AUSTRALIAN"
 June 25, 2016

This was copied into Dallas Beaufort's page in Facebook. I have copied it here because it needs a wider audience, and in a better vehicle than Facebook.

(Copyright News Limited and Chris Kenny, 2016)

Have we ever had so many people telling us what we shouldn’t be saying? We certainly have never had so many avenues available for expressing our opinions.

But the intrusions and lecturing over what views are considered appropriate are stultifying.
Soon, it seems, public figures will need to subedit every joke, workshop every criticism and run a focus group to test every piece of analysis.

Paradoxically, at the same time, in the menagerie of social media, millions of anonymous and not-so-anonymous accounts hurl a limitless and unrestrained array of foul abuse, threats and derision.
Welcome to the best of times and worst of times in the communications age.

This is an era when the rarest commodity is a person who says what they think and thinks about what they say. There is a sense that we are being deafened by a ­cacophony of multimedia noise at the same time we are being crushed into conformity. And it is helping to turn our politics into bland mush.
This week we have heard Labor politicians, ABC presenters and activists argue that the nation shouldn’t hold a plebiscite on same-sex marriage because the debate will be filled with hatred, bigotry and even violence. They are arguing we urgently need a social reform but that we can’t be trusted to debate it. It is self-imposed authoritarianism — auto-totalitarianism.

Politicians and community and ­security leaders have been avoiding mention of the threat of Islamist extremism because they fear offending people in Muslim communities.

The head of our national football competition warned that “words and jokes have incredible power” as he admonished club presidents over a misplaced gibe, and appointed a manager of “inclusion and social policy”.

Activists who have screamed for media access to Nauru studiously ignored a Nine Network report from the Pacific nation because they didn’t concur with its take on the situation — information, information everywhere, but not a point to make.

The election campaign is being covered by an unprecedented array of media organisations and platforms yet the leaders are doing fewer media interviews than they’ve done in the past. There are more pictures, jokes, insults, outrages, memes and angles than ever, but less substance.
The campaign is Facebook wide and Twitter deep.

Strangely, as access to media and information sources in­creases, we are seeing a retreat from plurality. Media is becoming Balkanised. There is less of an appetite for divergent views in public debate — and less tolerance.

Chillingly, just four years ago under a Labor-Greens government — a progressive-left administration — an attempt was made to impose de facto regulation on print media content. The ABC and the journalists union hardly raised a whimper.

The progressive Left still urges preservation of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, even though it saw a commentator sanctioned over published articles and the columns banned from republication. Some activists argue people who express dissenting views on climate change should be sanctioned.

Maverick politicians the world over — from Donald Trump to Pauline Hanson — are winning support for stridently addressing issues that the political/media class finds too difficult to discuss sensibly. We hear much about so-called slacktivism and we have become used to regular bouts of online outrage.

Yet there is something more worrying at play: a powerful attempt, particularly by the green Left, to control public discussion and silence dissent.

These are not new pressures, we know. It was George Orwell who imagined Newspeak as he warned of such sinister authoritarian tendencies in the novel Nineteen Eight-Four.

Thought crimes and doublespeak became part of our lexicon, mainly as alarming markers — things to avoid as we defended freedom during the Cold War. After the wall came down and we saw our liberal democratic model triumph in social, economic and strategic terms, it seemed that liberalism and tolerance would prosper unchallenged. But no — even without authoritarian regimes, the citizens of Western liberal democracies now invite new conformist approaches to public debate upon themselves.

Much of it is driven by political fashion. Some of us seem to want all of us to share the same views. The political fashionistas use politics, public broadcasters, social media and public institutions to further their cause.

You can witness their overbearing hectoring in the sanctimony of progressive politicians, preachiness of the national broadcaster or vile abuse of social media. If you are unlucky enough you’ll find them marching to your door, as happened to me recently after a complaint to the Australian Press Council.
Despite her public megaphone in parliament and limitless platforms though largely unquestioning media appearances, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young sought to undermine my reporting from Nauru last October by lodging a complaint.

Hanson-Young, despite numerous requests over many years, has refused to grant me an interview to discuss border protection issues.

Rather than answer my questions — or ask them of me — she used the APC as a vehicle to try to discredit my efforts at sharing facts and providing transparency on Nauru. Bizarrely, the council decided to investigate the complaint despite chairman David Weisbrot saying: “We are not at all, in this, contesting the accuracy, fairness or balance of the articles — we completely accept those.”
Instead, the council looked into the issue of privacy and found in my favour on that count, too. But consider how the press council allowed itself to be used in a game that is antipathetic to its aims of fostering free and open media.

Hanson-Young, instead of speaking to me, criticising me or debating me, hides from scrutiny and lodges a third-party complaint. It is aimed at silencing me and deterring others. It is weak, to be sure. But it is also insidious.

Two of my colleagues are enduring similarly ridiculous press council inquiries for daring to poke fun at the moral posturing and fashionable causes of the progressive political class. The green Left, which ostensibly would lay claim to supporting free and open debate, is constantly trying to shut it down.
They badger, deny and obfuscate rather than address hard facts and engage in direct debate. Just as Orwell outlined so pointedly in Politics and the English Language, they corrupt language with their thought and could corrupt public thinking with their language. Their language on issues that should be clear-cut is often characterised, as Orwell sum­marised, by “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

Hence, instead of recognising the horrible intent and deadly challenge of Islamist extremism, ABC presenter Waleed Aly gave us an indirect and subversive ­response to the Orlando gay nightclub massacre.

“I feel like what we’re witnessing is the tangible pointy expression of all of the fault lines and contradictions that run through modernity,” he said on Radio ­National. “Our world is now one that is an increasingly polarised and polarising contest between new frontiers of cosmopolitanism on the one hand and quite responsive and symbiotically related frontiers of atavism on the other, and within that lie all of the political narratives that have sustained us through the 20th century that simply don’t work any more, narratives like freedom, right, which you know expresses its own contradictions in America every time there is a mass shooting, when you see what freedom and a certain conception of freedom ends up looking like.”

The only possible interpretation of this verbiage is that he was saying — ever so obliquely — that America had it coming. This was a vile case of blame-shifting away from the culprit and his Islamist extremist ideology. Let’s talk about this.

Aldi Australia And 2016

The figures are not posted yet, but it seems that Aldi Australia has nearly doubled its turnover in 2015, compared to 2014. This is in spite of only increasing its shelf space by about 10% over the year, and the number of regular products from 1200 to 1350.

Effectively, Aldi has increased he average size of its customer basket to about 25 items, matching Coles and Woolworths. And to achieve the rise in turnover estimated, about twice the number of customers pass trough the checkouts as did a year ago. "Our New Year's resolution is to provide you with top quality products at the lowest possible prices!"

Since Aldi's prices have not risen in comparison to the competition, some other factor must be involved. The increase in TV advertising is the first clue. Not that this attracted the increase in customers, but it did attract favourable attention by the media, eager for a share of the advertising revenue.

Aldi had been doing a small amount of TV advertising during 2014, highlighted by its "surfing Santa" Christmas campaign. Its approach to the market had been seen as unique, and it tried a number of strategies that indicated its willingness to spend money. The turning point occurred when Choice published a survey that "proved" an Aldi shopping basket was as little as half the price of the equivalent basket from Coles or Woolworths. This was favourably reported by the media prior to the June holiday weekend, thanks to the advertising possibilities. It seemed to legitimize Aldi in the minds of the consumers, and in the long weekend that followed the report, Aldi customer numbers increased dramatically, kept on increasing, and most new customers made Aldi shopping a regular part of their shopping routine.

Coles had spent the previous four years engaged in a number of strategies to compete with Aldi and now other retailers joined the charge, effectively making Aldi the leader of grocery and variety merchandising.

A downside of the sudden shift in market leadership was that all players became confused, and so did the customers. Aldi recognized this by publicizing its 2016 New Year's resolution to maintain product quality while keeping prices as low as possible.

This year should see if Aldi can manage to achieve this.

"Our New Year's resolution is to provide you with top quality products at the lowest possible prices!"