The Inventor of the Web

This is a review of the book This Is For Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, which has, of course, completely revolutionized our lives. This book is his own account of the origin and development of the web.

I was particularly fascinated by it as my generation saw the web come up in our own lifetime - I remember in 1995 the librarian at the University of Rochester asking my incoming graduate class in physics to indicate by show of hands how many of us had ever used the web.

In the book, Berner-Lee's autobiographical details are interspersed with the narrative, but for this review I would like to tease them apart.

Bio: Berners-Lee talks about his unusual family background. Both his parents were electronic engineers. They encouraged young Tim to be a nerd (particularly notable, I thought, was the fact that the center of family attention was not the TV but the Encyclopedia Brittannica). Young Tim eventually assembled his own computer. Alan Turing was a family friend.

Berners-Lee had very good high school teachers. Then he went to Oxford for his bachelor's degree. He worked in a couple of technology companies before he joined CERN, perhaps a place ideal for his epoch-making invention: CERN experiments were producing a large amount of data, which needed computer analysis; CERN had the money to buy a large variety of computers to train on - mainframes, workstations, microprocessors; CERN was a large organization, a natural place to start thinking about how to connect people so they can share computerized information.

Later, he relocated to the US (MIT), moving the center-of-gravity of the web to America. His various awards (most notably a knighthood and the Turning prize) and three marriages are worked into the largely technical narrative.

WWW: Berner-Lee's pioneering idea was to combine the internet, which already existed at that time, with hypertext (computer text with clickable links to other text). He made the first web browsers (clients), and web servers (which hosted webpages).

The book talks about the early days of TCP/IP (the method of shooting data packets over the internet); email; FTP (hey I used the File Transfer Protocol in college!) and its eventual replacement by HTTP (this is the language that enables our browser to receive web pages from web servers); Berner-Lee's crucial use of Steve Jobs' NeXT computer to write his web code; his incorporation of the DNS system, his invention of the URL (a unique address for any resource on the internet; a name Berners-Lee did not like, incidentally).

Of course, the usual suspects of the story appear in the book: Vannevar Bush (one of the visionaries of hyperlinking), Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (the originators of TCP/IP), Gates and Jobs, Douglas Engelbart (who invented the computer mouse) and The Mother of All Demos, Hakon Lie (CSS for anyone who has ever designed a webpage), Guido van Rossum (who invented Python), Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Demis Hassabis and many more.

Themes that permeate the book include Berner-Lee's preoccupation with the user's personal control of their data, and open sourcing as much of the code development as possible. AI is another preoccupation. Thoughts about this include early but unfulfilled aspirations, the eventual rise of OpenAI, and concerns about where the field is going. A third prominent theme is the use of the web for promoting societal well-being (thoughts on social media are included) and what he calls intercreativity (group creativity - he gives Wikipedia as an ideal example).

Summary

The book is useful as a the personal take of the creator of one of the greatest inventions of all time. Berner-Lee's background, temperament, motivations and philosophy shine through the writing. His interactions with the pioneers give insights into the history of and motivation behind of the internet. For the bookshelf of the scientist, technologist or even layperson, I would say this book is an indispensable item.