Not long ago in a galaxy not far away - here on Earth, actually - there was no such thing as the Internet. We used to use these giant phones with dials on them, and you'd look things up in big yellow phone books and musty encyclopedias. Maps and dirty pictures were printed on paper. I know, weird.
Then one day a little over 20 years ago, this fellow named Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. This Web thing took off like scalded cat, a bat out of hell, a rocket sled to oblivion - the Big Bang? - the thing went crazy. And now it's hard to remember what pre-wired life was like.
Before the Web the Internet had been around for a while, but was the province of nerds and university researchers and Defense Department types. The Internet used all these archaic protocols (Archie, WAIS, don't even get me started...) so that in order to do anything useful, you had to know all these difficult commands and you couldn't really "surf" per se. In fact, cheesy old AOL was about the best way for mortals to use the Internet at all.
Then came Berners-Lee. His genius was seeing that you could take existing ideas - the linking of text and "pages" together - combine them with the Internet's existent infrastructure that wired together cities, universities and the like, and boom! you could create a sky's-the-limit network where everyone can connect to everyone else. (Technically, what he did was invent the basic protocols for how webpages and servers talk to each other.)
I remember the very first time I experienced the Web, way back in 1992 before you could even see pictures on the damn thing. There was a browser called Lynx, and you could browse the text-only Web (you still can - try it out!). Even on a Web without pictures, I remember sitting in front of my greyscale-screen computer linking around the world and feeling the awesome power of this secret thing that I could just tell was about to explode.
In April of 1993, Marc Andreesen launched the Mosaic browser, which could show pictures and text - what we still think of as a webpage today - and the rest is history.
Imagine - since 1992 the number of Internet users has grown from 7 million to 2.4 billion, now more than one-third of the population of the planet. For this we can thank Sir Berners-Lee.
Not only is Berners-Lee appearing twice (we are not worthy!) but he will be discussing a very important topic indeed.
The Open Web
In the beginning, the Web worked due to some simple rules. There was HTML, the language Web pages were programmed in, and some other straightforward protocols that made the whole thing run. Anyone anywhere could participate. Rock and roll.
Lately, however, the Internet and its new trends - from Facebook to cloud computing to Apple's iOS - is increasingly populated by closed systems. The death of the open Web has been foretold, but then again it's the nature of this technology to want to spread, and the most open systems often spread the fastest and last the longest. But the jury is out.
Tim Berners-Lee will speak twice on the "open Web," at the Convention Center at 11 a.m. on Saturday, and then at 3:30 p.m. the same day at the Driskill in more of a meetup setting. Touch the hand of the hand of the man who PWNed the printing press made the future now. (Berners-Lee's appearances are for badge-holders only, sad to say.)