Weaving the Web

"Tim Berners-Lee is the guy who designed and named the World Wide Web. He was a physicist, he was working in CERN, and this book is extremely engaging and readable. It’s very similar in some ways to Francis Crick’s The Double Helix, and he really just talks about where his invention came from, how it happened, and what everything you read about the history of the Internet tells you that a lot of it happened by accident. What he did was to slap a graphical front end on it. Before, what you have is, you have a lot of really crunchy back slashes and numbers and ampersands, and suddenly this guy comes along and, in a brilliant stroke which I don’t think he could understand the consequences of, he buried all that stuff under a graphical interface, just in a very similar way to the way in which Macintosh buries the command line under a graphical desktop. Berners-Lee put all that stuff a little bit underground. You can see it peeking out in the URL line in your browser, which still has that horrid ‘http’ in it, which stands for ‘hypertext transfer protocol’ which is what BL invented. But he turned it into pictures, which made it international, which made it user friendly, and, you know, it spread like a weed."