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Network Designer ——TIM BERNERS-LEE
By JOSHUA QUITTNER
Comprehension questions:
1. What examples of information do the author give that one can get on the Internet?
雪花女神龙片头曲2. How long ago, in what form, and by whom was the code “Enquire Within Upon Everything” started?
赵薇绯闻男友正脸3. What examples does the author give to show that some inventions credited to certain inventors were not really the work of one man only? Why does he give these examples?
4. What was it that interested Berners-Lee while he was at CERN and what software did he devise then?
5. What does the word “Enquire” mean?
6. What does a “hypertext” notebook?
7. Why did Berners-Lee open up his document and computer to everyone?
8. What preparations did Berners-Lee make before the World Wide Web debuted in 1991?石康军
9. Why was Berners-Lee called the quintessential child of the computer age?
10. Why does the author say that Berners-Lee chose the non-profit road at every juncture?
Want to see how much the world has changed in the past decade? Log on to the Internet, launch a search engine and type in the word enquire (British spelling, please). You'll get about 30,000 hits. It turns out you can "enquire" about nearly anything online these days, from used Harley Davisson for sale in Sydney, Australia ("Enquire about touring bikes. Click here!"), to computer-training-by-e-mail courses in India ("Where excellence is not an act but a habit"). Click once to go to a site in Nairobi and enquire about booking shuttle re
servations there. Click again, and zip off to Singapore, to a company that specializes in "pet moving." Enquire about buying industrial-age nuts and bolts from "the Bolt Boys" in South Africa, or teddy bears in upstate New York. Exotic cigar labels! Four-poster beds for dogs!
So what, you say? Everybody knows that with a mouse, a modem and access to the Internet, these days you can point-and-click anywhere on the planet, unencumbered by time or space or long-distance phone tariffs.
Ah, but scroll down the list far enough, hundreds of entries deep, and you'll find this hidden Rosebud of cyberspace: "Enquire Within Upon Everything"--a nifty little computer program written nearly 20 years ago by a lowly software consultant named Tim Berners-Lee. Who knew then that from this modest hack would flow the civilization-altering, millionaire-spawning, information suck-hole known as the World Wide Web?
qq空间背景音乐查询Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, this one truly was the work of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for the light bulb, but he had dozens of people in hi
s lab working on it. William Shockley may have fathered the transistor, but two of his research scientists actually built it. And if there ever was a thing that was made by committee, the Internet--with its protocols and packet switching--is it. But the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free.
It started, of all places, in the Swiss Alps. The year was 1980. Berners-Lee, doing a six-month stint as a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, was noodling around with a way to organize his far-flung notes. He had always been interested in programs that dealt with information in a "brain-like way" but that could improve upon that occasionally memory-constrained organ. So he devised a piece of software that could, as he put it, keep "track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn't." He called it Enquire, short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, a Victorian-era encyclopedia he remembered from childhood.
宋智孝现身深圳Building on ideas that were current in software design at the time, Berners-Lee fashioned a kind of "hypertext" notebook. Words in a document could be "linked" to other files on Berners-Lee's computer; he could follow a link by number (there was no mouse to click back then) and automatically pull up its related document. It worked splendidly in its solipsistic, Only-On-My-Computer way.
But what if he wanted to add stuff that resided in someone else's computer? First he would need that person's permission, and then he would have to do the dreary work of adding the new material to a central database. An even better solution would be 老男孩 吉他to open up his document--and his computer--to everyone and allow them to link their stuff to his. He could limit access to his colleagues at CERN, but why stop there? Open it up to scientists everywhere! Let it span the networks! In Berners-Lee's scheme there would be no central manager, no central database and no scaling problems. The thing could grow like the Internet itself, open-ended and infinite. "One had to be able to jump," he later wrote, "from software documentation to a list of people to a phone book to an organizational chart to whatever."