The wonder of the Web

Friday, October 1, 1999 Published at 06:41 GMT 07:41 UK

By Internet Correspondent Chris Nuttall

The academic and journalist John Naughton has given us a real sense of history about the development of the Internet in a new book born out of his own sense of anger at our failure to fully appreciate it as a giant leap for mankind.

"The Net is the most important thing that has happened in my lifetime. I am still staggered by how wonderful it is," he told BBC News Online.

"Part of the reason I wrote the book was that I was becoming enraged by the sort of complacency with which people were accepting it and the kind of condescending way in which they were taking it for granted.

"Creating the Net was a wonderful technical and intellectual achievement. It is so complicated and yet it works with astonishing resilience and it provides things I would have killed for as a child."

A Brief History of the Future, published on 1 October, traces the origins of the 30-year-old Internet as far back as the 1920s and the author's own interest back to his childhood obsession with short-wave radio in his "information-poor" environment of rural Ireland in the 1950s.

It is a personalised, even romantic account, rather than a dry history book which conveys the same sense of wonder about its subject as Richard Dawkins gives to science in Unweaving The Rainbow, also published this week, in paperback.

John Naughton begins his story in 1919 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the arrival there of Vannevar Bush. An electrical engineer and inventor, he went on to develop a computer in the 1930s called the Differential Analyser.

Norbert Wiener, a brilliant mathematician from the same era, is credited with fostering post-war interdisciplinary research at MIT that led indirectly to the creation of the Internet.

But one of the biggest ironies exposed by the book is that although the Web now enables instant peer review and access to research, those striving towards inventing it were often unaware that other academics in the US and UK were following exactly the same path.

Naughton supports the view of Paul Baran, the engineer he says has the strongest claim to be "father of the Internet", that it was built like a cathedral, being the work of many men.

But he also highlights the contribution of Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who invented the World Wide Web ten years ago.

"Tim is in a sense an exception because most of the other great developments that underpinned the Internet were in fact the product of collaborative work.

"But Tim Berners-Lee is unusual because he had the idea and he invented and executed the whole thing and he did it essentially in less than a year. He stands out in that sense in the story because he's the one person who really did it all."

The book ends with the development of Web browsers by Netscape and Microsoft and the growth of the Open Source movement with " a set of values that are quite alien to the business world" in its free distribution of software without any proprietary code, allowing others to improve on it and pass it on.

Naughton says he is concerned about the values that big business is bringing to the Internet and its obsession with ensuring security.

"I'm worried that what is happening is that the gathering rush to exploit e-commerce is going to change the architecture of the web and the architecture of the web was originally designed to give maximum freedom and to be open and my worry is that in the end the business world will try and close it."


* John Naughton is a Senior Lecturer in Systems at the Open University and writes a weekly Internet column for The Observer newspaper.


BBC News Online: Sci/Tech
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_462000/462435.stm>

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