Tim Berners-Lee > Quotes

“The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.”
― Tim Berners-Lee

“In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.”
― Tim Berners-Lee

“Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, A Framework for Web Science (Foundations and Trends

“What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URLs, HTTP and HTML. There was no central computer "controlling" the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even organisation anywhere that "ran" the Web. The Web was not a physical "thing" that existed in a certain "place". It was a "space" in which information could exist.”
― Tim Berners-Lee

“I would have to create a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. That meant as close as possible to no rules at all.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

“I found myself answering the same questions asked frequently of me by different people. It would be so much easier if everyone could just read my database.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

“The spirit there was very decentralized. The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission. That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost.”
― Tim Berners-Lee

“E-mail allowed messages to be sent from one person to another, but did not form a space in which information could permanently exists and be referred to.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

“I had argued that it was ridiculous for a person to have two separate interfaces, one for local information (the desktop of their own computer) and one for remote information (a browser to reach other computers). Why did we need an entire desktop for our own computer but get only a window through which to view the entire rest of the planet? Why, for that matter, should we have folders on our desktop but not on the web?”
― Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

“Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it’s better.”
― Tim Berners-Lee

“Infocom, publisher of the legendary computer game Zork, worked under Michael Dertouzos”
― Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

“sharing this information in a smart way would liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one invisible silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format?”
― Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

“On this same visit, I first met Ted Nelson – the one who had coined the term ‘hypertext’. Ted was an eccentric, wide-eyed dreamer who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate bridge. His 1983 book, Literary Machines, was an eclectic, non-sequential rant with some very specific ideas about the systems we should be using.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

“As Richard Dawkins points out, religions tend to get the adolescent to commit to their faith just a moment before they have the level of rational thought to be able to see through the whole thing.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

“felt a pop in my back – the pain was miraculously gone! I attribute this cure to a totally unconscious change in my posture: the ‘alpha’ stance of a primate ready for combat, standing tall with my shoulders back, attempting to appear imposing.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

“Most of systems still depended on some central node to which everything had to be connected [...]. I wanted the act of adding a link to be trivial. If i was, then a web of links could spread evenly across the globe.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

“he explained harmony as ‘Mr Strover’s Gearbox’. His gearbox diagram was always on the classroom wall: it was a set of overlapping three-letter gears, each representing a simple three-note chord. You could start in the ‘CEG’ slot, playing the C major chord, then connect that ‘gear’ via the G major chord in the ‘GBD’ slot above it. (This, in turn, connected to the higher D major gear of ‘DF#A’.) Mr Strover got us to hear what it was like to move up a gear, and down a gear, and he pointed out that a lot of songs just stayed in three gears, including much of the pop music repertoire. Thank you, Mr Strover, for your gearbox.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

“Clapham Junction.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

“1988, I was struck by the idea of combining two pre-existing computer technologies into a single platform. The first technology was the internet, which is a protocol for connecting computers; you’ve probably heard of it. The second technology was hypertext, which takes an ordinary document – like a technical manual, or a diary entry – and brings it to life by adding ‘links’. My idea was that these hypertext links could provide a simple way for users to navigate the internet.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

“urban planners like Le Corbusier designed ‘rational’ cities,”
― Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

“The spirit there was very decentralized. The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission,” he said. “That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost.”
― Tim Berners-Lee