Three times the syllables!
"Robert, do you want to be rich?" asked his friend, disappointed. Robert sheepishly thought, "Well, it helps, no?"1 The phrase “Money doesn't buy happiness, it buys crazy-ass happiness” hadn't been coined yet, but our guess is even if it had, it wouldn't have affected Tim in the very least. As Robert recalled years later in an interview "Tim’s not in it for the money."2
1856, “Enquire Within Upon Everything” is published. A book which taught you many a thing about many a thing. Wish to model a flower in wax? Enquire within! Wanna know how to cure a headache? Enquire within! How about burying a relative? Well, you guessed it, Enquire within! Make a will, plan a dinner, study the rules of etiquette , as the editors of this amazing little encyclopedia wrote in its introduction: “Whatever you may wish to do, make, or enjoy, provided your desire has relation to the necessities of domestic life, I hope you will not fail to enquire within.” By the late 1970s, they had sold over a million copies.
Fascinating as "Enquire Within Upon Everything” was, we’ve got to admit the topics covered in the book seemed pretty random. But that's alright, I suppose, because when it comes to thought and contemplation, humans are more than well-equipped to engage in thinking solely through seemingly random associations. For instance "the smell of coffee [may] conjure up the dress a friend wore when you last had coffee with [them]."3 Quite the example, isn't it? The point, however, is that this exclusive feature of our brain's capacity to make random associations is something our protagonist had been drawn to since he was a kid in the early 60s.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, science advisor to President Roosevelt penned a now-seminal essay titled "As We May Think." In this essay, he explicitly discussed how we all tend to think through associative trails rather than in terms of neatly labeled hierarchical classifications. Among other concepts in the essay, he envisioned a machine in the future called the Memex, which he hoped would one day become a logical extension of our memories. Here's Bush in his own words.
"When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome.
[But] The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage."
In fact, 27 years later, in 1972, philosopher and pioneer Ted Nelson built and expanded upon the ideas of Vannevar Bush. He wrote a paper titled "As We Will Think", a tribute to Bush's "As We May Think". Nelson hammered home the idea of hypertext, a term he is credited with coining some 7 years prior in 1965. Hypertext allows one to follow associative trails, the kind envisioned by Bush himself. Simply put, it’s a text that contains links to other texts.
Returning to our protagonist, Tim's full name happens to be Tim Berners Lee. Born in 1955 to parents who were both computer scientists, he grew up tinkering with electronics. He started with the not-so-fancy electromagnets which he used to build relays and switches. As he outgrew these basic switches, just so it happened, transistors became increasingly common. In fact, you could buy hundreds of them pretty cheaply. By the time he had moved on from transistors, microchips became, widely and more importantly, cheaply available. He reminisces, "Things came along at the right time; anytime we understood one technology, then industry produced something more powerful that we could afford with our pocket money.”4 It was certainly an exciting time to be interested in electronics.
His interest in electronics and his ponderings about our ability to think using associative trails provided ample fodder for what he would later go on to build. And boy, are we grateful it happened.
In 1980, he undertook a temporary software consulting position at the world’s largest particle physics lab, CERN, Geneva. During his 6-month stint there, his task was to design and create a system that could enable access to and retrieval of research done by over 10,000 people working on different projects, speaking different languages, with different software, hardware and individual requirements. Unfazed by the daunting task at hand, he embarked on the creation of a hypertext program, and called it Enquire, short for the encyclopedia he grew up reading "Enquire Within Upon Everything". "The program allowed him to link documents on the basis of single-word associations rather than through the branching hierarchies of existing systems."
While he was working on Enquire, something changed, and his vision for the project expanded into something significantly grander: “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked. Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which everything could be linked to everything."5
Unfortunately, the application Enquire didn't find many takers at CERN. Soon after Tim had to depart from CERN, leaving behind an 8-inch floppy disk containing all the code, and the project eventually died. But, fortunately for us, the idea didn't.
And just a few years later, in 1984, he returned to CERN on a fellowship to work on distributed real-time systems for data acquisition and system control. The team he joined had the responsibility of collecting the results from all the experiments conducted at CERN. However, upon his return, he discovered that the floppy disk containing all the code was no longer available. Despite the setback, the reconstruction began! The monumental idea that was conceived while writing Enquire was resurrected! Looking back, Tim recalls, "I wanted to access different kinds of information, such as a researcher’s technical papers, the manual for different software modules, minutes of meetings, hastily scribbled notes, and so on.”6 He didn't set out to create another data management system; instead he aspired to build a creative space of sorts, “something like a sandpit where everyone could play together.”7
And so, the stage was set! We had the hypertext and the internet in place, Tim was on the path to crafting the essential components for creating the most groundbreaking application the internet had ever witnessed. But before that future came to fruition, Tim needed to find someone else to turn his dream into a reality. You see, back in March of ‘89, when Tim submitted his funding proposal to the managers at CERN, no one was quite sure what to make of it. The proposal stated, "The hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve. A ‘web’ of notes with links between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.” The response he received, "Vague, but exciting."8
But soon, Tim would find just the person he needed! His name was Robert Cailliau, an engineer from Belgium, and as Tim would later state, “In the marriage of hypertext and the Internet, Robert was [the] best man.”9 Adept at handling bureaucratic hurdles, he was the manager who could get you funded. And so began their collaboration: Tim focused on unraveling the intricacies of the software, while Robert ensured they obtained the necessary funding.
Finally, the time had come to resubmit the proposal. This time, they couldn't afford to be ‘vague’ anymore. The original title Tim came up with for the proposal was "Information Management". Robert despised the title and insisted on something less dry. However, they seemed to have trouble agreeing upon the eventual name. For instance, the title "Mine of Information" was suggested, but its abbreviation "MOI" (which means "me" in French) was a bit excessively self-centered for their taste. Another suggestion was “The Information Mine”, but abbreviated, it was just TIM. Repulsed by the idea, Tim proposed one more title and famously said “Let’s call it the World Wide Web.” Shocked, Robert replied “We can’t call it that, because the abbreviation WWW sounds longer than the full name!” And just like that, with a title bearing three times the syllables, it became "Worldwide Web: Proposal for a Hypertext Project.”10 And as the saying goes, the rest is history.
Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau didn't merely make the world wide web a reality. They badgered CERN into forgoing any royalties to be charged for this invention. Thanks to their insistence, the world wide web was released under the GNU General Public License and with a user base accounting for more than half of the world’s total population, to this day, it remains the biggest free open-source project in history!
Thank You Fuzzy Klarity team for such an interesting read.
Thank you Tim, Robert... and Shwetank!