Even email is no longer really decentralized. Google and a few other email silos now make up the bulk.

I&#x27;ve heard of diaspora being described like email.

That was essentially the promise of RDF, OWL, The Semantic Web, Web2.0 and so on. After swimming in that stuff for 3 years in the early 00&#x27;s, I could tell back then that it was mostly a boondoggle, and even though those technologies have found their niche, the project failed for the same reason that the original WWW was successful.It was like &#x27;AI&#x27; in the 80&#x27;s, but with XML.

diaspora probably was the most popular failed project which tried to achieve this. It did not really fail per se, but it&#x27;s pretty clear by now that it will never reach impactful adoption.

As a matter of fact, this is what Sir Berners Lee is working on right now at MIT.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solid.mit.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solid.mit.edu&#x2F;</a>The issue is not storing the data, just like &quot;email&quot; doesn&#x27;t store data. It&#x27;s just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service.Ex:Don&#x27;t like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don&#x27;t lose the ability to interact with people who do use Gmail.Don&#x27;t like Facebook? Go to Ello. But now you&#x27;ve lost your entire network.The decentralized web will be built on data formats and protocols that allow you to take your data with you and force companies to compete with the quality of their service, not the size of their network.

&gt; There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.The difficulty with decentralising is that these are the biggest challenge to centralised systems like Facebook; they&#x27;re problems which are very nice to have (&quot;oh no, we have a billion users!&quot;).The biggest challenge for decentralised systems is getting momentum behind an agreed-upon protocol.Email was born when there were few people who needed to agree, and their major concern was being able to send&#x2F;receive messages. As the Internet expanded, the momentum behind email ensured that it could ride that wave as well.These days the Internet, and hence the number of people who need to agree on the protocols, is huge. Think about, for example, HTTP2; how many organisations and individuals were involved in its definition and publication? How many more have been involved in implementing it for various browsers, servers, crawlers, libraries, etc? How many more have been installing updates, editing config files, etc. to use it?Another change is the concerns of the stakeholders; if all we cared about were sending&#x2F;receiving messages, then we could use something like telnet, HTTP, email, etc. Instead, the concerns are more fuzzy (e.g. &quot;presence&quot;, &quot;likes&quot;, etc.) and more political (silos vs federation vs p2p, expectations of privacy, encryption, archiving, searchability, etc.). Reaching agreement on such things is very difficult, as everyone wants different things.The results either:- Have buy-in from too-few people (e.g. diaspora, pump.io, gnusocial)- Are so general as to be inappropriate for most particular tasks (e.g. RDF; an interesting example considering that RSS is a stripped-down subset of RDF, and is&#x2F;was widely adopted; also compare to ATOM, which took that subset, threw away the ties to RDF, and became more interoperable!)- Only offer tiny featuresets (e.g. the various microformats)

I expect getting that many requests would be a bigger challenge than serving them.

Have you heard about Mastodon?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tootsuite&#x2F;mastodon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tootsuite&#x2F;mastodon</a>It&#x27;s like a decentralized version of Twitter, with federalization. Might need to find a instance that&#x27;s not busy with signups though.

That&#x27;s the nice thing they did in the 90s and before. They created standards like FTP, HTTP, Gopher and whatever and people could build upon these standards. Now we are back to everything being proprietary,

What about GNU Social? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;GNU_social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;GNU_social</a>I run a GNU Social site. It works well. It&#x27;s a bit slow and the themes are out-of-date, but if it had more of a following I&#x27;m sure we could turn it around.

This this this.I really like the idea that Eben Moglen seems to pitch in every of his recent talks when talking about FreedomBox:A decentralized network of cheap &quot;plug-computers&quot; that run Facebook-like functionality on the hardware of the users. And yet, while FreedomBox is a great project and does many things right, it omits the one crucial aspect of this: the decentralized social network.Let&#x27;s hope Solid or something similar takes over the social networking world eventually and we can get rid of all the megacorporations hoarding our data.

Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.

This is true, unless you pay for the social network, or it&#x27;s p2p.It&#x27;s not purposefully evil or inherently wrong, just an inevitable consequence of the business models involved in free-to-use social networks.I&#x27;m trying to explore whether a paid social network could be a workable model with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postbelt.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postbelt.com</a>Please check it out :-)

Appreciate the realisation but this really is repeated ad nauseum and is not an original thought in the slightest

thats true, but they also provide lots of useful features to users.

I had a similar realisation.What&#x27;s the product in a social network?It&#x27;s you.

The problem is that such control is not imposed by you, but by the network owner.

It may be good, after all we are talking about private information. Some degree of control and exposition are welcome.

Tim Berners-Lee seems to be much more idealistic about how the web should be in that regard, because he knows it&#x27;s the right thing to do.And yet he decided to be &quot;pragmatic&quot; on web DRM, instead of taking the same idealistic approach because it was the right thing to do.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gruik.io&#x2F;view&#x2F;1238" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gruik.io&#x2F;view&#x2F;1238</a>

Tim&#x27;s vision for a Giant Global Graph (2007)<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dig.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;breadcrumbs&#x2F;node&#x2F;215" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dig.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;breadcrumbs&#x2F;node&#x2F;215</a>and something we tried to do as well: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yansh.github.io&#x2F;articles&#x2F;moana&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yansh.github.io&#x2F;articles&#x2F;moana&#x2F;</a>

I like indieweb but I&#x27;m not on board with their &#x27;design first&#x27; slogan. I think to be most effective such a thing should be &#x27;content first&#x27;.

I&#x27;m sorry if this has to do with my sleepiness, but from that page I don&#x27;t understand at all what this is.   A kind of social CMS? A bloggers community?  The page is rich in word count but poor in being informative.  I&#x27;d be very grateful if somebody could give a little explanation of what this is, because, it seems to be an interesting thing.

then you&#x27;ll like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yunohost.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yunohost.org</a>

This is why I&#x27;m a fan of the indie web (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieweb.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieweb.org&#x2F;</a>).

Key quote (for me) from the interview:&quot;A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network.&quot;source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;604052&#x2F;webs-inventor-tim-berners-lee-wins-the-nobel-prize-of-computing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;604052&#x2F;webs-inventor-tim-...</a>

Probably want that in-line, as a clickable link:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;People&#x2F;Berners-Lee&#x2F;Kids.html#What1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;People&#x2F;Berners-Lee&#x2F;Kids.html#What1</a>

I think his work on educating people about the web ever since it&#x27;s creation is pretty awesome.His list of questions for kids is great, especially the one on &#x27;what happens when I click a link&#x27; [0]<pre><code> [0]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;People&#x2F;Berners-Lee&#x2F;Kids.html#What1</code></pre>

The word, at least, was coined [1] by Ted Nelson, published 1965. The idea goes back at least to Vennevar Bush&#x27;s Memex proposal [2] in 1945.I haven&#x27;t heard Kay mentioned as an early proponent of hypertext, I&#x27;d be interested to hear more if you can find it.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elmcip.net&#x2F;node&#x2F;7367" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elmcip.net&#x2F;node&#x2F;7367</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Memex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Memex</a>

While hyperlinks are the essential contribution (which however existed long before the web already), I think the foundational work of encoding text digitally and universally (pioneered by SGML inventor Charles Goldfarb, James Clark, the TEI project, and many others) isn&#x27;t honored adequately here.

TBL created the web, certainly - but hypertext prior to the web goes far back as an idea (at least as far back as Alan Kay - also an ACM Turing Award winner, IIRC)...

For anyone who doesn&#x27;t know, the www is a a &quot;hypertext&quot; project where documents can contain links to each other. By clicking these links, a wide variety of content is exposed. For example, consider how much easier it is to use Wikipedia than to have to look up references in the index (page numbers by word occurrence) of a printed book. You can just click on a link and follow it.
In all, most people spend most of their online time reading pages that have hyperlinks in it, which they follow.It&#x27;s certainly a paradigm shift similar to what Gutenberg accomplished.

I think you meant 20th (or 21st) century.

Pish-posh, the cotton gin was invented at the end of the 18th century.

I believe the most useful invention of the 19th century was possibly the cotton gin :)

Odds of becoming a US dollar billionaire are higher than odds of winning it in your lifetime.

Diffie and Hellman won it only last year, 40 years after their seminal paper was published! It is indeed a very tough award to get.

That&#x27;s an interesting point. I interpret the prize&#x27;s criteria &quot;for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community&quot; to be less in Claude&#x27;s space and more in the applied space. Scrolling down through the list of past winners, I&#x27;ve implemented several of the work of winners and am using the WWW right now to communicate this.On the other hand, I think I use Claude&#x27;s work in the same sense that I use Kirchhoff&#x27;s laws everyday.

Let&#x27;s hope he will be awarded one day, posthumously.

&gt; This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago.Claude Shannon never won it.

Yes they are very useful. I was only counting computer related contributions since Turin award only recognise people who contributed to computing community.

discovery, not invention.(But I guess developing them into a useful product is itself an invention. Maybe there&#x27;s no bright line between discovery and invention.)

I suppose our world could function without antibiotics, but not without the transistor ...

&quot;the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is of importance for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. The food production for half the world&#x27;s current population depends on this method for producing nitrogen fertilizers.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fritz_Haber" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fritz_Haber</a>

It&#x27;s hard to top antibiotics in terms of useful inventions.

Then again Steve Cook who proved the existence of the class NP-Complete was awarded the Turing Award only 11 years after his paper was published: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amturing.acm.org&#x2F;award_winners&#x2F;cook_n991950.cfm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amturing.acm.org&#x2F;award_winners&#x2F;cook_n991950.cfm</a>

Looks like if you want to be famous, you have to be loud. Maybe that explains why he has been vocal against walled gardens lately.Thanks for the recommendation. Let me check it out. Let me search for it. WWW is very important to my life.

I don&#x27;t want to detract from TBL&#x27;s accomplishments, especially on this occasion but, he didn&#x27;t solve the hypertext problem insomuch as he decided that the really hard things like provenance and bidirectional linkages weren&#x27;t important. Google and Facebook did solve those problems, but only for commercial benefit. Moreover, it&#x27;s clear that TBL regrets that early decision to the degree that he rails against the walled gardens.

&quot;The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.&quot;-- Alan KayThat quote is pretty unfortunate. I guess nobody&#x27;s perfect.

With all respect to Tim Berners-Lee, I think the principle of least power is overrated. For example, even binary Horn clauses are Turing complete[0]. Whatever configuration language you can come up with (HTML, CSS, or whatever), it&#x27;s either Turing-complete or not, and if it&#x27;s Turing-complete there is no danger of executing infinite loops as long as you have some cutoff for resource requirements. The only thing that matters is whether the code is properly sandboxed before it tries to do any I&#x2F;O.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ps.uni-saarland.de&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;documents&#x2F;devienne_94.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ps.uni-saarland.de&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;documents&#x2F;devien...</a>

&gt;For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don&#x27;t understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google.Kay&#x27;s criticism of the Web is very well justified and (like most of his high-level criticisms) typically misunderstood. He doesn&#x27;t criticize it as a repository of hyperlinked documents. He criticizes it as platform for application delivery, which it became. Modern web with all its scripts is a VM -- and badly designed one at that.

Torvalds didn&#x27;t add anything to CS. He just wrote a Unix-like kernel. The kernel took off and the project grew to include thousands of devs and became the biggest OSS project ever, but still, it&#x27;s a kernel, not much different in essence from any old Unix kernel. Git? Again, popular project, nothing new. It was even started contemporaneously with Mercurial, which is essentially equal to it, and both are no new inventions at all, DVCS was here since the 90&#x27;s.Stallman did Emacs in whose invention AFAIK he did take part, and then he took part in implementing some other innovative projects, though I don&#x27;t really know his CS career (I mostly know him as the face of GNU and FSF).IDK but having created a popular project should not be equal to a big innovation in the field.

I always felt that Tim Berners-Lee was not respected enough in both the computer science and programming communities. I felt it especially after working for over a decade at Google, which literally built its entire business on TBL&#x27;s architectural concepts.For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don&#x27;t understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google.It would also not have been possible for the web to make the jump from desktops to cell phones as the #1 client now. You know the handler in iOS and Android that makes &lt;select&gt; boxes usable? That&#x27;s an example of the principle of least power.I recommend reading his book &quot;Weaving the Web&quot; [2] if you want to learn more about the story behind the web.I&#x27;m very glad that TBL is getting this recognition. He is a genius and also has a very generous personality.People in the programming community seem to talk about Torvalds or Stallman a lot, perhaps because of their loud styles, but I don&#x27;t see that much about TBL.Ditto in the CS community. &quot;HyperText&quot; used to be a big research area but I guess TBL solved it and people don&#x27;t talk about it anymore.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rule_of_least_power" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rule_of_least_power</a>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drdobbs.com&#x2F;architecture-and-design&#x2F;interview-with-alan-kay&#x2F;240003442" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drdobbs.com&#x2F;architecture-and-design&#x2F;interview-wit...</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny&#x2F;dp&#x2F;006251587X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny...</a>

Inventors of transistor, led by William Shockley, already won a Nobel prize in Pysics for their invention of transistor. All 3 of them.

Transistors are much more important IMHO.

No I think you&#x27;re spot on. It&#x27;s easy to see the web as an obvious invention with hindsight, but just imagine a world where tcp&#x2F;ip is the only protocol available to you. I could easily imagine a world in which someone thought to create an across-the-wire binary specification rather than a really simple text protocol. The genius of http and html is that they are very simple. I remember right after the dot-com bubble crashed a bunch of people basically said the web was dead and that we should be passing binaries back-and-forth. Inventing something simple and useful that the average person can easily pick up is the work of a genius (and yes, the average person can write html, my mom doesn&#x27;t understand how the internet even works, but she writes html for her job).

This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people&#x27;s lives.EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.

You can read the original proposal here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;History&#x2F;1989&#x2F;proposal.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;History&#x2F;1989&#x2F;proposal.html</a>

According to Wikipedia and himself, he wrote up a proposal and was encouraged by his boss to implement it as an &quot;unofficial&quot; project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;People&#x2F;Berners-Lee&#x2F;FAQ.html#Influences" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;People&#x2F;Berners-Lee&#x2F;FAQ.html#Influences</a>

The difference is a lot less strict in academia, which CERN is strongly connected to.

Question: did TBL invent the WWW as part of a job-related project while at CERN, or did he invent it as a personal side-project using time&#x2F;resources of his employer?

A side channel of an extremely low bandwidth... 5-10 bits &#x2F; hour?

Hmmm... so you have a TBL number of 1, for some definition of TBL number.

&gt; the inventor of the www&#x27;s butt.Ah ha! I did suspect he was not acting alone - who did the other bits and bobs?

You should have licked the seat, so a part of him could become forever a part of you.

When I was an MIT student I worked one summer at CSAIL. The office I was in had only a single occupancy bathroom. One afternoon I went to use it and just as I got there I saw that TBL was exiting. Once I went in and sat down, I noticed that the seat was warm!Highlight of my life right there, having my butt warmed by the residual heat of the inventor of the www&#x27;s butt.Ahem, in any case, congrats to him! Definitely well deserved.

I see, how am I supposed to know that? is it listed anywhere in HN?

You might have omitted &quot;woman&quot;.

Your comment, although well-meaning, also didn&#x27;t add anything to the conversation. People tend to vote those down.

You&#x27;ve derailed this thread without adding anything substantial. HN usually frowns on that. Also though, your comment came off as political.

Just drop off the woman (or man) part and you are fine. What&#x27;s weird, as a native speaker, is your use of woman in this context. It&#x27;s just odd: it&#x27;s unnecessary and it adds gender where it isn&#x27;t appropriate.

Ha, yeah, I&#x27;m a man. I think if people knew you&#x27;re not a native speaker they&#x27;d have cut you more slack. While &quot;man&quot; can be used in an informal and friendly way (&quot;congratulations man!&quot; wouldn&#x27;t have raised any eyebrows), &quot;woman&quot; doesn&#x27;t work that way. Instead, it comes across as sexist, since the only time you hear it is a chauvinistic man bossing a woman around (&quot;dammit, woman, get over here!&quot;). I admit it doesn&#x27;t make sense, but there&#x27;s English for ya.

I don&#x27;t understand the minus points here. Did I piss a bunch of people off?I genuinely loved OPs comment here (gave it an upvote). So instead of saying &quot;woman&quot; here If I just &quot;assumed&quot; he is a man and said congratulations &quot;man&quot; or &quot;bro&quot; would I get plus points?

We detached this subthread from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14031769" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14031769</a> and marked it off-topic.

This story makes me feel good. I feel TBL doesn&#x27;t get his just recognition from all the people who take advantage of what he made for us without even knowing the origin. Good on him.

&gt; I was wondering what happened to guy who invented emailI&#x27;m afraid he died last year.

Offtopic. I was wondering what happened to guy who invented email. I kind of remember reading that he was living in poor conditions. Did a search on &quot;inventor of email&quot; and found a controversy about some guy who claims to be inventor of email(Shiva Ayyadurai). That&#x27;s not the guy I was looking for. Instead I was thinking of Roy Tomlinson, as I found his name in an article called: &quot;Ray Tomlinson&#x27;s &#x27;story&#x27; about inventing email is the biggest propaganda lie of modern tech history: Shiva Ayyadurai&quot;[0]. But seems like Ray has already passed away.[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economictimes.indiatimes.com&#x2F;magazines&#x2F;panache&#x2F;ray-tomlinsons-story-about-inventing-email-is-the-biggest-propaganda-lie-of-modern-tech-history-shiva-ayyadurai&#x2F;articleshow&#x2F;51337493.cms" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economictimes.indiatimes.com&#x2F;magazines&#x2F;panache&#x2F;ray-to...</a>

I guess I like the Fields medal model better - it&#x27;s awarded only to people younger than 40 to encourage future achievements.

Turing Award is the highest IT award (hence &quot;the Nobel Prize of computing&quot;) given for a lifetime&#x27;s work. If some junior scientists would do something as groundbreaking, I&#x27;m sure they will receive this award too (after some time maybe; web wasn&#x27;t invented yesterday either).

Well yeah, his contributions are immeasurable, my argument is more about the social utility of placing the money there.

Tim Berners Lee did amazing work from which everybody, you, me and any billion dollar company founder like Zuckerberg has benefited many times over. He deserves all the recognition and awards he gets and more.He deserves this award and he shouldn&#x27;t have to give up to any up-and-comers. Let them figure it out.They&#x27;re already standing on the shoulders of this giant. That&#x27;s Tim&#x27;s contribution.

I greatly admire the guy but does TBL OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS really need another award or title? All that money and publicity could be directed towards promising junior researchers who need it!

If you&#x27;re interested in the history of the Web and its inception, I highly recommend you this (non-technical) reading TBL wrote some years ago. Really inspiring.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny&#x2F;dp&#x2F;006251587X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny...</a>

I&#x27;m very happy he&#x27;s not only won the award, but also that he&#x27;s used it as a springboard to highlight ongoing privacy, security and information freedom issues.Personally I think that&#x27;s a mark of a great pioneer who is still using his capabilities for the best interests of us all.

Yes, Archie[1]. Wonderful resource until it was superseded.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Archie_search_engine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Archie_search_engine</a>

GIF came after patenting of LZW I think in 1985, making it on to the internet in ~1987.PCX, BMP (1985?) or TIFF (1986?) maybe? PBM and PGM I think are slightly earlier but I can&#x27;t readily find dates for them.

jpeg wasn&#x27;t invented until 1991, so probably not. :)  Most likely they were GIFs.

I do not share the&gt; The Web is the best example I can think of for why we still need net neutrality.I think the Web is best example of why we need privacy protection as it is a form of communication.I personally pay for a VPN. And I hope my right to use independently implemented (independent from Google&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;ISPs) privacy preservation technology and de-anonymization-resistant technology is not lost, and instead encouraged by the legal system.In my view, the so called &#x27;net neutrality&#x27; is simply a deceiving name for &#x27;a subjective favoritism&#x27; given away (as political&#x2F;economic favors) to some web-monetization players vs others.Eg. ISPs cannot favor&#x2F;unfavor content providers, but yet Search engine company can favor&#x2F;unfavor&#x2F;rank content providers.So ISPs are labeled as &#x27;evil&#x27; while search and social networking service providers are the &#x27;good doers&#x27;.

I personally think it&#x27;s important to remember how the Internet worked with TBL invented the Web. Most importantly, everyone believed and implemented net neutrality. I think it&#x27;s a very interesting thought experiment to imagine if we would even have the web had the University of Minnesota decided to drop all http packets to promote their competing gopher protocol.The Web is the best example I can think of for why we still need net neutrality.

I remember doing internet research before there was the web. For example in the late 1980s I studied California earthquakes. The USGS had a public ftp site where they put daily epicenter map images (jpeg?) and text databases of epicenters. I wrote automated scripts to download new stuff.I remember there even internet search engines at the time. People wrote automated scipts to look for public ftp ports and compiledbthe results. The internet only had a few thousand addresses at the time, so it wasnt an ardorous process. I think one of these databases was called archie.

Looks like HN is bombarding it, so:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:SwQAer7j_6QJ:news.mit.edu&#x2F;2017&#x2F;tim-berners-lee-wins-turing-award-0404+&amp;cd=3&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=us" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:SwQAer7...</a>

It was few years back when some one ask on Quora for - &#x27;Who Still Not Get Turing Award For Their Work?&#x27;. I was the one who name Tim.Glad man get credit for his work.

This is perhaps the most proportionately insignificant prize given for any invention in the history of humanity.

I&#x27;ve met him on a few occasions. I used to be active in Semantic Web and I&#x27;d run into him at the Cambridge Semantic Web Meetup -- Massachusetts, USA not England).He seems like a generaly good guy with some real forward thinking and I like many for the ideas he has. I&#x27;m happy for him.

What&#x27;s special about that date that makes you ask that?
Edit: Oh, I get it now. 404 Not Found.

Is it a coincidence that the award is announced on 4&#x2F;04?

TBL is a great role model. He saw an important opportunity to make the world better and he executed on it selflessly.I do think he probably should have started a browser company or something though. The nice thing is that his beautiful dream for the web is (slowly) coming true.I love looking at that NeXT box he used as the first web server: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CERN_httpd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CERN_httpd</a>

For a moment my brain read &quot;Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Complete&quot; LOL

I was watching the penultimate episode of Halt and Catch Fire Season 3 this morning while doing my morning run at the gym.
Towards the end of the episode, Donna faxes over a document about this great new invention, she recently encountered as a VC, called the &#x27;WorldWideWeb&#x27; to Joe. 
Pretty coincidental :)
Thanks, Tim!

Reading the comments here and being a netizen since internets inception is weird;Wtf do we want?????We want privacy, anonymity but also credibility and our ego boosted.Fuck the government fuck spying, but acknowledge how awesome I am... all at the same time. So pick fucking one!So... I propose the following internet user-name platform where only users who know you IRL can vote on your commentsWe removed downs and vote counts from hn and reddit - so let&#x27;s only allow ppl to vote on anything you say If they know you irlYeah that idea won&#x27;t go over well, but fuck .gov censorship whilst claiming all they claim

So the ACM is now handing out Turing Awards for people making the FOSS community build stuff around an exciting, open technology, only to bait and switch and poison it with DRM?Impressive.

&quot;I’m humbled to receive the namesake award of a computing pioneer who showed that what a programmer could do with a computer is limited only by the programmer themselves&quot;That&#x27;s like the exact opposite of what Turing proved, with the halting problem and all.I&#x27;m any case, a well deserved award!

Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award