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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Expertise and Innovation - was Re: Non-Borg serv
 Michael Champion wrote: > I'm reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) story > that Tim Berners-Lee was ignored or scorned by > the hypertext community of the late 80's / > early 90's because his stuff was so trivial and > didn't address the interesting problems. The story isn't apocryphal. It is true. Tim's paper was, for instance, turned down at the International Hypertext Conference (the one in Pittsburgh if I remember right) for similar reasons. And, the truth is that what Tim did *was* trivial and it *didn't* solve the "interesting problems." What Tim did wasn't even new. The important thing here isn't whether people correctly judged the technical merits of Tim's work -- rather it is that people rarely realize that even "trivial" solutions that don't solve "interesting problems" can be massively and profoundly useful. My first reaction to Tim's work was much the same as the rest of the community at the time. Hearing that he'd worked at CERN, my first thought was: "Oh! This is just some guy who has written a Unix version of the VMS-based "Memex" system that I had installed at CERN back in mid-80's." In fact, my hypertext system was even more capable then Tim's was since it had images in its first version and was even able to link to non-text objects like records in databases, files in code management systems, etc. (This is why we called it "hyperinformation" -- not "hypertext." We even supported creating links to and from media in which you couldn't embed the links. Nonetheless, Tim's work resulted in the massive revolution of the Web while mine did not, nor did any of the other systems (many much more capable than Tim's) that preceded his work. Tim's work didn't succeed because it was technically brilliant. It succeeded because of timing, being on the "right" platform, being open-source, solving a large enough problems to be initially useful, etc. If you had been in the Hypertext community during the late 80's, you probably would have "ignored or scorned" his work as well since the reasons for its success had little to do with actually solving what were considered the problems of hypertext. The "interesting problems" that Tim's work didn't solve are *still* interesting and little progress has been made in solving them. Read the old Vannevar Bush article "As We My Think" and you'll see that we *still* don't have systems like what he described. We still can't, for instance, trade "trails" of links with people and we still don't have systems that even record or analyze such trails for private use. We still have tremendous problems with cataloging what is in hyperspace -- not even Google can solve this problem. And, we still have really serious problems representing visually what a large collection of links look like -- people still get "lost" in hyperspace... We still only have one kind of link. (i.e. links don't have types.)... These are only some of the "interesting" problems that Tim's work didn't address. What surprised many people who knew about this stuff was that you could build a useful system without solving these problems. Those who said that Tim's work was "trivial", or "not-new" or "didn't solve interesting problems" were right. But those who said it wasn't "important" or "useful" were wrong. bob wyman 
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