Everyone here knows (or should know) that the internet started in the 60s (kinda, 1986 definitely), and WWW was a short project in 1989-1990 by TimBL, which just happened to catch on like wildfire (due to bandwidth increases, and cheap PCs more than anything else).
Tim Berners-Lee invented the first cut of HTTP (GET / POST etc), and got the ball rolling on HTML (which was basically a clone of the 1960s SGML).
Paul Otlet seems to have been something of a visionary (just like Ted Nelson, Project Xanadu's head).
TimBL was just in the right place, at the right time.
But it's silly to say that his only contribution was a few months writing WWW. He also wrote ENQUIRE 10 years before, which was kind of like Apple's HyperCard (1987 - between ENQUIRE and WWW).
Not quite actually refuting what you said: HTML was certainly based on SGML (the similarity is obvious!), but it never was an SGML application. It only became an SGML application in the spec a couple of years later at the impetuous of DanC — no major HTML consumer has ever used an SGML parser for HTML.
> the internet started in the 60s (kinda, 1986 definitely)
There are three years you can reasonably point to:
1969 was when the ARPANET project was founded by the DoD. This is the kitchen-sink-historian viewpoint: The ARPANET was the first packet-switched network and was certainly the ancestor of the Internet, but very little specific has carried over into the modern day. The main innovation from this early was packet-switching, or dividing up the message into a lot of little packets that are all individually addressed and can each make their own way to their ultimate destination. This provides reliability, simplicity, and economy compared to the phone system.
1977 was when the first gateway was demonstrated: Specifically, it was the first TCP-based transmission between three dissimilar networks. This is the functionalist viewpoint: Both TCP and the heterogeneous network-of-networks concept are essential to the modern Internet. The network-of-networks concept (implemented by gateways) allows different physical networks to share the same data, for example phone lines and Ethernet cables and WiFi. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) guarantees reliable and in-order transmission of data over unreliable physical networks, mainly by resending packets that got lost. Once you have gateways and TCP, you have the modern Internet. http://www.computerhistory.org/press/30th-anniversary-intern...
1983 was when NCP was ditched for TCP/IP on the ARPANET. This is the most restrictive/pragmatic view: NCP was the underlying protocol suite/software used on the early experimental ARPANET, whereas the TCP/IP protocol suite (as implemented by a lot of different software) is what we use today. NCP was implemented by specialized hardware and would have been prohibitively expensive to replicate anywhere else, whereas the TCP/IP stack has been implemented multiple times for multiple kinds of hardware and on multiple OSes. TCP/IP allowed the Internet to take off.
I am being downvoted, because my assertions (admittedly in unpolished form) aren't backed by popular views (some of which are polished products, Manufacturing Consent) and because I stick to my guns and do my best to warn others about some things that are (not) supposed to happen especially at CERN.
simply that the media loves to simplify this kind of thing.
The media (and the beeb, almost openly since Dr. Kelly) does what it has been "ordered" to do, ie. "maximising opportunity and minimising threat":
ps: Enquire was a Gutenberg project alike of a book (read digital form), which is admitted by TimBL. But you are right: information systems existed for a long time, and presumably will for a long time.
> I am being downvoted, because my assertions (admittedly in unpolished form)
You're being downvoted because you keep reposting (word-for-word) the same nonsensical rant on HN[0] and various other places around the web. Perhaps you could tidy it up between now and the next time you repost it so that we can understand your argument.
Everyone here knows (or should know) that the internet started in the 60s (kinda, 1986 definitely), and WWW was a short project in 1989-1990 by TimBL, which just happened to catch on like wildfire (due to bandwidth increases, and cheap PCs more than anything else).
Tim Berners-Lee invented the first cut of HTTP (GET / POST etc), and got the ball rolling on HTML (which was basically a clone of the 1960s SGML).
Paul Otlet seems to have been something of a visionary (just like Ted Nelson, Project Xanadu's head).
TimBL was just in the right place, at the right time.
But it's silly to say that his only contribution was a few months writing WWW. He also wrote ENQUIRE 10 years before, which was kind of like Apple's HyperCard (1987 - between ENQUIRE and WWW).
There were lots of other Hypertext systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Implementations). But that doesn't mean TimBL was a fraud, simply that the media loves to simplify this kind of thing.