The World Wide Web’s Father is Disappointed in His Child

The promise of the World Wide Web and the Internet was the democratization of information and the ability for the people to participate. In many ways it has devolved in to a tool for mass surveillance, hacking and monetization that is unrecognizable from what the Web’s founder, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, envisioned…and he’s not happy about it.

Vanity Fair has a great piece that is definitely worth a read:

“I WAS DEVASTATED”: TIM BERNERS-LEE, THE MAN WHO CREATED THE WORLD WIDE WEB, HAS SOME REGRETS. Berners-Lee has seen his creation debased by everything from fake news to mass surveillance. But he’s got a plan to fix it.

I’ve always wanted to meet him and still hope to do so one day. I’d let him know all the ways his creation has changed my life and the positives FAR OUTWEIGH the negatives.

Because this is a fun-fact-to-know-and-tell, below is the original NeXT machine Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web on in 1991 and used as the world’s first “web server”:

This NeXT workstation (a NeXTcube) was used by Tim Berners-Lee as the first Web server on the World Wide Web. It is shown here as displayed in 2005 at Microcosm, the public science museum at CERN (where Berners-Lee was working in 1991 when he invented the Web).

The document resting on the keyboard is a copy of “Information Management: A Proposal,” which was Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the World Wide Web. The partly peeled off label on the cube itself has the following text: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”

Just below the keyboard (not shown) is a label which reads: “At the end of the 80s, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web using this Next computer as the first Web server.” The book is “Enquire Within upon Everything“, which TBL describes on page one of his book Weaving the Web as “a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents’ house outside London“.

This image is a new upload by Coolcaesar of the original JPEG file on en:September 22, en:2008 directly to Commons in response to continued vandalism of the original. It has been re-published on Connecting the Dots under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.