The world wide web? Computer Educated people only?

Question

Hi

In the quote below what does he mean by learning a different program on each computer, what programs is he refering to.

And can you explain the whole quotation in simple terms, what does he want to say?

I posted this question once before, and someone said that by programs he refering to Operating systems, but why would you use an operating system, which is a host, it hosts your applications.



thanks


"Well, I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. So finding out how things worked was really difficult. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee.
Because people at CERN came from universities all over the world, they brought with them all types of computers. Not just Unix, Mac and PC: there were all kinds of big mainframe computer and medium sized computers running all sorts of software.
I actually wrote some programs to take information from one system and convert it so it could be inserted into another system. More than once. And when you are a programmer, and you solve one problem and then you solve one that's very similar, you often think, "Isn't there a better way? Can't we just fix this problem for good?" That became "Can't we convert every information system so that it looks like part of some imaginary information system which everyone can read?" And that became the WWW."

Answer 1

The person that said Operating System was basically correct. Before Windows each computer had it's own proprietary operating system.

IBM computers ran MVS, JES, CICS, etc. Depended on the computer and the company that owned the computer. HP Computers ran something called MPE. You had to know the operating system to get access to the computer then you had to know the application(s) to get access to the data.



Back in the 60's, 70's and part of the 80's before personal computers there were mainframes and mini (midrange) computers. Each system was different, say IBM mainframes 4331, 4341, 3080's, etc, HP mini computers (HP-3000's) and DEC (PDP11's) for example. Each computer stored information differently. If the data was on an IBM 4331 you would have to know how it was stored. Maybe VSAM files, maybe DB files (database), etc. If they were on a HP-3000 they may be stored as KSAM file, Image DB files, etc.



You had to know the specific system in order to know how to access the data. You also had to know the layout of the data. If you looked at a record and it said 04050503James Jones45999760912 you have no idea what you're looking at. You need a map to decipher the first string of numbers which may be his driver's license number, then his name, the next may be his CDL number and the next is birth date.

The above is purely an example.



I think the author was saying that the data needs to be presented the same way across the whole internet so anybody accessing it will know exactly what it is.

That's basically what has happened with the advent of HTML, Java and a few other languages. The browser was the interface that linked them together. The WWW (Internet) is a different type of computing environment. You're not actually doing computation computing, you're more or less looking at pictures. Think of the news site as a big picture. There's no computational processing involved. The main screen is obtained (picture) then all embedded articles are just links behind the text to other pictures (articles, graphs, etc) stored on a computer somewhere.

Answer 2

It sounds like this was written several decades ago, when computers were a lot different than they were now. Back then, computers were new and pretty rare, and so they weren't mass produced at all. There was no such thing as a standard operating system like Windows or Mac OS, and if someone had a computer then they probably had software on it that they had created themselves. You couldn't go to a computer store and buy programs, you had to make your own. So everyone had different programs, and if you wanted to use another person's computer, then you had to learn how to use their programs, which were different than the ones on our computer. And by programs, I mean things like the operating system, early word processor type things, and things like that. They didn't have the internet back then. And you had to use other people's computers, because the internet didn't exist yet. If you wanted information that was on another computer you had to go use that computer. Computers weren't connected to each other in any way. I'm sure you can imagine that that was time consuming and difficult. Plus computers weren't graphics based back then either, you had to type commands instead of clicking on an icon to open something. That meant you had to learn and memorize a whole bunch of commands if you wanted to do anything. And different computers had different commands. And, remember, you had to physically go to a different computer if you wanted the information that was on it. Not to mention the fact that sometimes the other computer might be in a different country. So, basically, he's saying that he was thinking that it would be great if there was an easier way to do things, like if you could connect to another computer from your own computer without having to go and learn how to use the other computer. And so the World Wide Web was invented. That's what the web is - a website is information stored on someone else's computer that you can see on your computer by using the internet. Suppose you have a friend who's living overseas right now, and they have some pictures you want to look at on their computer. They can put them on a web page, and you can see them without even leaving your home. Without the WWW, you would have to get on a plane and go to their computer and look at them. That's basically what he's saying.

Answer 3

The best answer I can give you is that prior to the establishments of standards for computer information interchange, every machine had the option to transmit data in their own native code. But IBM used EBCDIC for its character codes. Others used something called SIXBIT. Still others had their own proprietary formats. None of which could be read by other machines without some sort of conversion library. The TCP/IP standards came into being to settle on exactly how certain files would be transmitted and received. Thus we came to define ASCII and other ANSI standards for compture data interchange.



This was actually what the speaker was referencing. And the answer that says it was operating system differences was off the mark. Until the US-ASCII standard was recognized, every major brand of machine had a very different representation for the letter A. At the hardware level in many cases.

Answer 4

Thats a Tim Berners-Lee quote!



He means that in order to view scientific information on different computers and OS's , for example Mac vs. PC vs. Solaris, you had to learn the programs on the different Operating systems required to view the data. So he invented a web network that shared a speficic protocol (like HTML for example) that worked the same on all operating systems. This enabled the researchers to share their research between computers without software and learning curves getting in the way.



This was the birth of the internet, and the World Wide Web.

Answer 5

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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"The World Wide Web," "WWW" and "Web surfing" redirects here. For the Web browser, see WorldWideWeb. For other uses, see Web and WWW (disambiguation).



WWW's historic logo designed by Robert CailliauThe World Wide Web (commonly abbreviated as "the Web") is a very large set of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, the World Wide Web was begun in 1992 by the English physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and Robert Cailliau, a Belgian computer scientist, while both were working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1990, they proposed building a "web of nodes" storing "hypertext pages" viewed by "browsers" on a network,[1] and released that web in 1992. Connected by the existing Internet, other websites were created, around the world, adding international standards for domain names & the HTML language. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web. Cailliau went on early retirement in January 2005 and left CERN in January 2007.



The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important role in popularising use of the Internet.[2] Although the two terms are sometimes conflated in popular use, World Wide Web is not synonymous with Internet.[3] The Internet consists of a worldwide collection of computers and sub-networks exchanging data using wires, cables and radio links, whereas the World Wide Web is a huge set of documents, images and other 'resources' linked by an abstract 'web' of hypertext links and URLs.

Answer 6

Yes, old computers had no standard of communicating like today each individual language(Human) is almost completely jibberish if you have no knowledge of it, he is saying each program on each computer operate differently. He is speaking of Protocols eg. FTP, TCP/IP, every computer connected to the internet has to follow these protocols(rules or Laws) like every car on the road follows the same laws( The Highway Code) and can almost reach flawless communication.

Answer 7

as he says, different programs on different operating systems like unix, windows, OS on the mac and also bespoke programs made just for one purpose which were written for which ever OS