When Tim Berners-Lee created the original Internet protocols he was not alone. Let’s not forget Robert Cailliau. Robert Cailliau was to Berners-Lee as Maurice Wilkins was to Watson and Crick.
Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel with Watson and Crick for discovering the double helix of DNA. Most people probably don’t recognize the names of either Calliau or Wilkins; not to mention Rosalind Franklin (Look her up).
But somehow Al Gore does get credit, at least from himself, for creating the Internet—go figure.
When Berners-Lee was inventing the Internet, he was trying to develop a computer system for the sharing of information. He was working at the Conseil Europeen pour le Recherche Nucleaire at the time, aka CERN—still a very cool place, trying to develop a way for researchers to share information that was stored in different ways on different computers without having to write a formatting/translating program every time the systems wanted to speak to each other.
They were creating a universal language for computers so that very different kind of computers with different computer “languages” could all talk to each other and understand what was being said.
Kind of like Esperanto—only better!
Interestingly enough, the decision makers in the government and associated bureaucracies at CERN, were not interested in adequately supporting Bernard-Lee’s work, presumably because they could not see it for what it was—a revolution in human evolution following an almost “instant speciation” event in the computer lab that would forever change our world.
