Inventions: WWW-owzers!

So, having your car break down on the way home wasn't such a bad thing. At least you got to pay all your bills, read the business section of the Times and Post, setup a sell on one of your stocks based on a feeling you got from an article in the Times (which turned out to save you thousands), check the score of the Knicks game, manage your fantasy hockey pool, reply to your boss' fuming emails and provide some balm to the work wounds, look at pictures of the vacation spot you're inevitably going to have to take your wife to for missing dinner once again, buy tickets to the sympony to show your family-values and how you realize the importance of culturing your children, check out a few new bands, and twit that you were broken down on the side of the highway (which actually prompted your buddy Chuck to come and help you out of your jam).

Now, if you were stuck in the 80's, you might be thinking "uh huh, right, and what were you driving, a Delorean?" I feel ya man, I 'discovered' Coldplay after they won a bunch of grammy's. But no, really, this can actually happen now. It's not magic. It's the WWW. WWWell, I guess it's kinda magic. But not like black magic that kills dingos in their sleep or anything. It's magic because it has transformed the entire world, and opened up a whole new universe of possibilities.

So, why the WWW? Shouldn't I be writing about the internet? Or better yet, the modern computer? Why not the transistor and other gizmos required to make computers? Or the gadgets required to make the gizmos that make computers? Or the cell phone that you used to do all that? Or the...

Enough already. Yes, they're all very formidable inventions, and any one of them could have easily made the list of the top 5. But they didn't. The WWW did. Why? Because of the simplicity of the idea and the fact that although the other devices are all required to make the WWW happen, the WWW is the most powerful communication medium in human history and enables the development of such a wide variety of useful applications.

In March of 1989, while working at CERN in Geneva, the English physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed the WWW: "a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet. " By Christmas of 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the necessary tools to have a working Web, including the first web server, the first web browser, and the first web pages (which explained how to use the web). Not surprisingly, Berners-Lee is now the Director of the the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is the main international standards organization for the WWW. In August 1991, he posted about his World Wide Web project on a newsgroup (alt.hypertext), which is considered the debut of the Web as a public Internet service.

What Berners-Lee did singlehandedly is postitively mind-numbing. Did I mention that en route to creating an invention that has singlehandedly changed the way the world operates, he also invented a few other things you may have heard of? For example, he needed to create a language for people to use the Web in (HTML), a protocol for the information exchange (HTTP) and a way for people to access that information (URLs). It's... incredible. As my sister says, "I hope he patented it."

By 1993, the Internet was catching on -- but really, it was the WWW that was enabling this.



In everyday conversation, people use the words "web" and "internet" interchangeably, however in reality, they're very different. The Web runs on top of the Internet. The Internet is a system of interconnected computer networks, and the Web is one of the many servies that runs on it. The Web today is composed of a tremendous number of interlinked web pages that can be viewed with a web browser, and can contain all sorts of multimedia: text, images, videos, audio clips, etc. but it is not the Internet. For example, calling the Web the Internet is like calling Windows* a computer -- Windows enables us to use a computer more easily (arguably) and we can build applications that run on Windows, but the computer still exists without it and can be used through other means.

So if you're not convinced that the web should be on this list, ask yourself how you got to this web page. Ask yourself how you found the last 10 things you were looking to find out. Ask yourself how many hours a day you spend using the Internet, and how many of them are spent using a web browser. Quickly you'll see why this is in my list of the top 5 inventions that have enhanced livability.

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* kill me now Computer Gods, for naming Windows instead of saying generically "an operating system" or "Linux"; it's simply because everybody** that uses a computer knows what Windows is, but the same cannot be said about an operating system, or Linux

** okay, maybe not everybody