Review by James Gleick: “It’s hard to remember—impossible, if you’re under thirty—but there was an Internet before there was a World Wide Web. Experts at their computer keyboards (phones were something else entirely) chatted and emailed and used Unix protocols called “finger” and “gopher” to probe the darkness for pearls of information. Around 1992 people started talking about an “Information Superhighway,” in part because of a national program championed by then senator Al Gore to link computer networks in universities, government, and industry. A highway was different from a web, though. It took time for everyone to catch on.
The Internet was a messy joint effort, but the web had a single inventor: Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva. His big idea boiled down to a single word: links. He thought he could organize a free-form world of information by prioritizing interconnections between documents—which could be text, pictures, sound, or anything at all. Suddenly it seemed everyone was talking about webpages and web browsers; people turned away from their television sets and discovered the thrills of surfing the web.
It’s also hard to remember the idealism and ebullience of those days. The world online promised to empower individuals and unleash a wave of creativity. Excitement came in two main varieties. One was a sense of new riches—an abundance, a cornucopia of information goodies. The Library of Congress was “going online” and so was the Louvre. “Click the mouse,” urged the New York Times technology reporter John Markoff:
There’s a NASA weather movie taken from a satellite high over the Pacific Ocean. A few more clicks, and one is reading a speech by President Clinton, as digitally stored at the University of Missouri. Click-click: a sampler of digital music recordings as compiled by MTV. Click again, et voila: a small digital snapshot reveals whether a certain coffee pot in a computer science laboratory at Cambridge University in England is empty or full…(More)”
