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.

******

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).

*****

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.

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!"

Manufactured Ignorance Part 1

Recent advertisements in the press are now touting "manufactured diamonds" instead of "artificial" ones. Seems the old term has too many negative connotations. The sale of mined diaminds is controlled by a world diamond federation controlled by De Beers. Too many diamionds available means prices drop.

The idea of engraving a serial number was introduced to stop the flow of so-called "blood diamonds" and the sale of arms to such countries as Angola. Very commendable. Nothing was said, though, about the working conditions of the African labourers who mine the bulk of "legitimate" diamonds.

A mantra of the diamond trade is the search for the perfect flawless diamond. It is the imperfections in diamonds that make them characteristic, and flawless diamonds are considered most valuable.

Industrial diamonds have been manufactrured for many years, but have been too small for any use except high-grade abrasives. It is no conincidence that the manufacture of larger stones (1/2 carat and larger) occurred at the same time as De Beers demanded that legal diamonds be etched with a serial number. Any diamonds without this number would then be considered to be illegal blood diamonds, or artifical ones.

It is no surprise that manufactured diamonds are indistinct from mined diamonds, except that they are perfect (and lack the diamond merchants' serial number, of course).

How long before a small miner begins salting its leases with manufactured diamonds made to look like mined diamonds?

This notion came back to mind after the Australian miners started their campaign against the super profits resources tax. Surprisingly, the biggest complainer is Exstrata, based in Europe. The tax does not negatively affect a miner's profitability. In fact it increase the manouvering room a miner has in market negotiations. But what the tax does, and no one seems to mention this, is guarantee the entry of small miners into the resources business. Now, this added competition is definitely not in the interests of the established miners, but they can't say that the tax will actually increase competition and reduce prices of manufactured goods (and coal-based power) to consumers.

Australia is the first country to introduce a financial incentive of this nature for competitive resource exploitation. This has international ramifications, and it must be stopped here, hence Exstrata's involvement.

No way, Jose! Let the lies begin, and the public servants manipulate those lies to serve their own ignorant agendas.

***** *****