30 years since the birth of the World Wide Web ?
I believe it. So that would, if it .... reassure me that we are now in 2021 ?!
So therefore we must be talking about 1991?
That was a weird era ! I mean, in my pronouncement so far, I think we've got
to the stage of the mid-80s where you had
Macintoshes becoming available. You had other workstations beginning to
become available, from people like SUN and Apollo Domain
I think it was something like that. So, things were moving on but yet,
weirdly, the World Wide Web which came after the internet, remember,
is basically how should these Internet
capabilities be harnessed and packaged to be Sean-and-cameraman
friendly. so that ordinary mortals can do it, you know. And it was not obvious
In those early days. I seem to recall there were information
services weren't there? Like Archie and WAIS
Wide Area Information Services. People were really trying to find out ... well if we do
have interconnected networks on computers
how do you know who's got what and where everything is?
And i think the idea about WAIS was making
basically catalogues of what's where and all this kind of thing.
But i think, to be fair to him, [Tim] Berners-Lee's great achievement was
being able to think out of the box. Perhaps it was the
fact that he was trained as a scientist and not as a
computer scientist and i don't know ..., that he could think outside the box.
But basically the whole thing about, y' know, the http
and the internet protocol (IP) and all this kind of stuff. Really he managed to work
out pretty something pretty robust about how this
would work. In the very early days, I think we touched before, y' know, on the
fact that the gap between something becoming
vaguely possible and something becoming commonplace could be anything up to
10 years? Did we once agree? And here's a classic example of it.
I mean, in 1991, yes i was very slightly aware of it but i didn't see it
i.e. the Internet such as it was and any development. So i didn't see it
as being massively essential [for me]. >> Sean: Well, of course, we didn't actually have the
Internet so the news wasn't travelling fast at all! You had to read about it somewhere
in print, or [in] some kind of mailshot. >> DFB: Yes, that's right.
In fact my very earliest usages of the Web, when it became available,
were for really boring things like working out that
so-and-so had got a set of files that implemented something on another Unix
machine so we didn't necessarily have to
make a magnetic tape or burn a CD, or whateve. We could actually
go to that site, not just to pick up a bit of email because that was
fairly straightforward, but also to actually, with permission,
download a whole suite of files. What about
photos then? My memory about early attempts to download
photos down an early Web [link] thing. I mean, honestly ...
>> Sean: My memory is of being at University and me and a friend of mine going on BBS's
[Bulletin Board Systems] and this was after the World Wide Web
existed, but we had some sort of fractured connection
to the Web through a BBS. And yeah, occasionally, you
might be sent some photos and it took an age
to download them. And by the time they downloaded were they what you wanted in
the first place. Possibly not! Do you go off and spend another
several minutes waiting for the next one to download.
Yes i think this is where we would benefit, if
people wanted us to say more on this, from having got Julian Onions as part of the
Computerphile team, as it were, because he
was he was with me i think, as I remember, in that first phase of his
career at Nottingham. I think he was with me till the early
90s and he would be pretty sound on which
machine was it that first had a Web browser on it, capable of even
visiting another site let alone doing anything serious.
The ability to actually have what - should we say
interactive video material - made available at ultra slow speeds over the
Web may have been in the early to mid-90s
among the ultra keen people who could just about
bear getting it to work. But how long does it take to become
commonplace? The answer, as ever, is 10 years
My major concern, at the time, late 80s early 90s, exactly this era,
for me, was a transition from PostScript to PDF.
Now, we've done videos on certain aspects of this but I think
perhaps what i haven't explained about my
great adventures in this regard, was that in the middle 1980s and
with the development and announcement of PostScript basically as a
graphics language available on Macintoshes and,
notoriously, available by having a [Apple] laser printer running that language,
requiring enormous amounts of memory, for the time, [and] costing a fortune.
fortune. It couldn't be got any cheaper than $7000 but it was touch and go.
I mean, the hardware was only just fast
enough to render that [300dpi] page at that time.
What struck me at the time, and I was very much in the era
of knowing that my future, in some sense, would lie
in documents d- Digital Documents, Electronic Publishing.
I thought, y' know, there is something about this [PostScript] language because, of course,
PostScript is Turing Complete. It's a weird language.
Remember, it works on a stack. You overtly program
in Reverse Polish [postfix]. You don't say 'a + b' or even '+ a b'
You say 'a b +' and in a much more verbose way, that is the way
PostScript works. On top of it being an excellent
2D graphics language, moving beyond what most printers would have regarded as the
"toy" of the [Apple] laser printer people began to ask: "Would
it be possible to put this PostScript language
on real typesetters?" Yes, it would. And a bit bemused i think by the runaway
success of the Apple Laserwriter, yes it was Linotype
that took the initiative of saying "yes" to an idea internally about
"How do we try and migrate PostScript onto a real typesetter?"
Because i've talked about my adventures with the [Linotronic] 202 typesetter. But it was not
PostScript based, but they tried one out just
as an idea and people said: "Oh that's wonderful - we want it!
Doesn't matter about the cost *too* much but you'll have to get it down quite a lot
from [what you're asking] if you want to sell lots and lots of them".
So, in the end then, that convinced me
that just in my narrow world of journal publication I wanted to create
an electronic document learned journal which I did. It didn't run
for very long because the Electronic Documents 'learned conference'
[now ACM DocEng] was far more popular than the journal so we started off with
Electronic Publishing. But then, gradually, it morphed into being
a vehicle for publishing the Proceedings of the Document Engineering
Symposium, as it were, and it's gone [om] to [be] great guns from there.
But anyway, I was messing about then, at an early stage, with doing
proceedings for conferences all in PostScript and thinking "Well this is
good because you're actually archiving a
[machine independent] program and this could run, you know, ...
although the hardware will be very different and maybe they're emulating a
layer on top of it, there will always be a way you can write an interpreter for PostScript."
So, here's my electronic archive that
is potentially machine independent. Yes, of course printers [i.e. printing companies] archived
but they always archived on the basis that the world would be
ruled totally by Monotype and Linotype
They are in charge and what they say goes.
And [at times] I was treated like a pariah for saying "I'm sorry,
it's not going to be like that. It's all about [fonts and] computer graphics.
And it's computing companies that are going to win out of this -
not just purely graphic typeset companies
And i was right but [almost] nobody would listen to me at the time.
So yes, this is perhaps another anecdote of "How i met
John Warnock" Because people ask me. And [thry] say well
"How did Adobe get to know about your conviction that PostScript would be a
good archiving mechanism." And the answer was that I was working
with John Wiley UK, the journal publishers at the
time and suddenly my contact at Wiley's [UK] down on the south
coast [of the UK] got a "Dear Mark Bide letter [that was the name of the Publishing Director"
"We understand from our contacts that you are
considering doing a future journal related to
Electronic Publishing and that it might be under consideration
as to whether to use PostScript as the typesetting language and as the archival means?
Would you care to join me
and my colleague Dr Chuck Geshke for tea in London ? "
[at the Park Lane Hotel i think it was] signed: Yours sincerely John Warnock".
The two co-founders of Adobe [no less] So Mark rang me up in great excitement
[and] said: "Well you know this madcap idea of yours, of using the
most expensive typesetting software solution
seems to at least have got the big boys interested!" And, yes, it was absolutely
hilarious i mean John Warnock s a good friend as a result
of this largely because it was clear he and
Chuck were such good friends and so much 'singing from the same hymn sheet'
There was nothing put on about it. They
just said: "We're delighted you're doing this and we'll give you every help".
Obviously, y' know, i think at the end of the talk they did
indicate that there were works in progress
that might come up with a sort of "flattened" version of PostScript
that was much more suited to doing electronic documents.
I think the feeling was: "Well PostScript's wonderful
but it is Turing Complete. In a sense it's too powerful.
There is nothing in PostSscript to [prevent you from s saying] "Here is my code for rendering this page
It will be beautiful but - tell you what - just to annoy you all,
before i do this [i.e. render the page] i'm going to use Postscript to calculate Ackermann(4,2)
which as we all know takes [more than!] 27 quadrillion years.
Or even Ackermann 3,1] which might take 15 minutes [on a 1990s machine].
Of course you wouldn't do that - but somebody malevolent might do that to you.
So in a sense Postscript being Turing Complete was perhaps a bit too
powerful for something that only needed a
declarative statement of "I want this to happen
exactly this. I will leave the implementation of it to you."
Now, in a way, it rang bells when the Web became available because here
was yet another declarative solution but coming from a slightly different
direction . So this Adobe thing [initially codenamed Carousel] was eventually
revealed to me as PDF and the other
declarative solution which was not as - how shall we say - dot for dot accurate
at the time as PostScript, I saw them very much as being
complementary. You know, if you want ultra-super Vogue fashion magazines
electronically over the Web yes it's going to be PDF. If you just
want some pretty decent graphics although it's developed a lot,
The World Wide Web, but using a declarative model
of the the HTML language. I think as we've discussed the
difference between an imperative language that can do (say)
Ackerman's function and a declarative one that can't
is that this Turing Complete [imperative way] that can do anything
needs to be able to ask for more memory and to get it.
There is no way in PDF for overtly asking and saying
"Give me lots of memory because i want to mess about and make you unbelievably slow".
And that's a great advantage
to have a restricted language that will try and stop people playing games!
If you could have hidden things in PDF
would it have ... yeah, would it have taken off.
I don't think it would. And i think Ii remember hearing that there'd been a
robust discussion at Adobe to the effect that one or two people
were starting to use PostScript preludes to do all
sorts of weird and hairy things and wasn't this a
fantastic selling point for [PostScript] as a
wrapper format for anything and everything?
And the answer came back from somebody on the team there saying
"Basically this is not a feature it is a bug!"
And we have got to sit on it firmly. People are now of course utterly
aware of Trojans and so on and so forth, in a way
that they weren't in the kind of early-late 80s early 90s,
when this was just seen as "Oh wow! isn't this incredible"
So, that was the situation then. You'd got like a bit of a chasm between the two -
between HTML and PDF. One of the things that fortunately
happened, around about the early 90s, was that Tim Berners-Lee and others
headed off at the pass any attempt to
make, as it were, the Web [and HTML] be the property of either Apple or Microsoft or whoever.
He [Berners Lee] set up the World Wide Web consortium whose you know ...
one of his founding tenets was to try and be platform neutral fair to everybody
and to have clearly published standards.
The Wworld Wide Web consortium that everybody could
agree to and nobody would try and pull a fast one on anybody else.
Because i think even Microsoft had to admit [that]
they'd try and rule the world with it but they wouldn't succeed. But latterly
of course, what has changed everything and
again this business about just faintly possible to send a photograph or a slow
moving movie in the early to mid 90s [versus] everything totally routine and above
board in YouTube [of the] 2004-5 [era]. Something like that. What was needed of
course, in those 10 years, was not just any further realization about the
[markup] language it was just the infrastructure needed to be faster.
So there of course you're up against Telcos and
Telecom Companies have to be sufficiently enough of computer
companies, or to have big clients saying: "We need more bandwidth;
we do not want 38 kilobits per second out of AppleTalk, thank you very much
we would like it to be at least 38 megabits, right, afactor of 1000 faster.
Now get on with it!" But, of course, once
it's been established that serious people with serious money
will pay for that then development will follow.
But there is always a bit of a a lag - a bit of an "induction period" - there
for people to say: Yeah! you know, that idiot Brailsford is right [for once]
This is going to take off; we'd better make plans.