Finished ‘Weaving The Web‘ by Tim Berners-Lee tonight. Tim writes like he talks, moving quickly one from thought to another. Reading the book is a reminder of how nascent the WWW is, it was just over 10 years ago that he formally proposed the WWW while at CERN. We’ve seen so much so fast the last couple years.

Not to be outdone by Tim, here are my scattered notes:

Quote from Michael Dertouzos, the director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science: “Many people in the world believe that technology is dehumanizing us. At LCS, we believe that technology is an inseparable child of humanity and that for true progress to occur, the two must walk hand in hand, with neither one acting as servant to the other.” (postscript: Michael died on 8/27/2001)

“The fundamental principle behind the Web was that once someone somewhere made available a document, database, graphic, sound, video or screen at some stage in an interactive dialogue, it should be accessible (subject to authorization of course) by anyone, with any type of computer, in any country.” (page 37) — And that folks, is the Web, in a nutshell.

“Atoms each have a valence — an ability to connect with just so many other atoms. As an individual, each of us picks a few channels to be involved in, and we can cope with only so much. The advantage of getting things done faster on the Web is an advantage only to the extent that we can accept the information faster, and there are definite limits. By just pushing the amount we have to read and write, the number of emails we have to cope with, the number of Web sites we have to surf, we may scrape together a few more bytes of knowledge, but exhaust ourselves in the process and miss the point.” (page 202, emphasis mine) — I know some people who should take this principle to heart. Yeah! You! 🙂

It’s interesting to note (as Tim does on page 195) that most radical innovations are at first scorned or thrown aside; “… A few people get it; most don’t.” Do venture capitalists look for ideas like this? How are innovations like this grown and matured into feasible entities?