July 5, 2004
EVEN THE PREMISE IS SILLY, BUT...:
Europe loses ground (Thierry Chervel, 6/22/04, Eurozine)
The Europeans have invented the internet, but the Americans have come up with all business ideas for it. Moreover, American newspapers have proved much more generous when it comes to giving free access to their articles and publications. If Europe wants to create a public sphere, then European newspapers must finally wake up to the chances that the Internet provides.The Internet is by and large considered an American invention, a myth that is even kept alive in the US. A short look back into the history of this technological revolution corrects this mistake. The qualitative leap, which first lifted the Internet from the sphere of universities, computerfreaks and the military, took place in Europe. The British Tim Berners-Lee invented the html-standard, which turned the net into the world wide web and rendered it practicable and usable for millions of users. The MP3-standard, which reduces music files to a twelfth of their original size and brought the music industry to the brink of ruin, was developed by a few scientists at the Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen (the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits) in Erlangen, Germany. And finally the net in its current format could not exist if it wasn't for the Finnish Linus Thorvald who invented the Open Source-software Linux. This software did not catch on in the sphere of personal computers but more for servers, i.e. those computers that feed the contents into the net and turn it into the net in the first place. Without Linux, the entire netpopulation would have to pay licence fees to Microsoft. The net would have developed in a rudimentary form at best.
So it was Europe that first turned the net into a mass media and yet it is everything but a European success story. Surprisingly, all the authentic business ideas that are connected to the Internet have all been developed in the US.
...quick show of hands here: who finds that surprising? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 5, 2004 12:04 PM
Just as ambitious, talented Europeans drain out of Europe towards the U.S. (with a few lodging in Britain on the way out), so do the useful inventions of talented europeans find their maximal employment overseas. . . .
Posted by: Twn at July 5, 2004 12:34 PMChervel is dealing with half-truths. The Internet proper (not the World Wide Web) is an American invention, via the evolution of DarpaNet, created by DARPA and American universities to create a communications infrastructure that would survive a nuclear attack on any one of its nodes.
Berners Lee did invent HTML and HTTP and brought us the World Wide Web. Linux may be a popular server operating system, but it is a clone of UNIX, which is an American invention. The web was off and flying before Linux made its debut.
It is instructive that Chervel thinks Linux is the critical server software for the Web, based only on the fact that it is an alternative to Windows. This displays the goofy, socialist/anarchist point of view that considers the Internet some kind of anti-capitalist, egalitarian social movement. No wonder they can't figure out how to make money from it.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at July 5, 2004 1:34 PMEurope invented the Internet? I was on ARPANET in the late 1970s and Europe was nowhere in sight back then. TCP/IP is a purely US creation.
Linux is a copy of Unix, invented at AT&T and Berkeley.
While the WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland, it is derived from Hypercard, invented at Apple.
Posted by: Gideon at July 5, 2004 1:48 PMActually Europe did have a brainchild for replacing the Internet. It was called the OSI Reference Model. It was an attempt by the world PTT (Postal, Telegraph, and Telephone) monopolies to wrest control of the Internet out of the hands of the US government, to be replaced by the ITU (International Telecommuncations Union) and the UN.
The bureaucrats at the DoD fell for it, and at one point the DoD actually mandated replacement of TCP/IP by OSI.
But saner heads prevailed. OSI was incredibly complicated; the standards were written in a bureaucratic language that nobody understood. Eventually the DoD dropped the OSI mandate.
The OSI had a 7 layer protocol stack, the Internet has 4 layers. Nuff said.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at July 5, 2004 11:19 PMAnyone literate enough to
use a VCR could use the internet prior to the
WEB. The internet was like radio (or the phonograph) ,
HTML added the high fi, but nobody would confuse
the latter with being a primary invention.
Also, graphical browser technology was perfected
at U.S. universities. The average joe is not
going to use an ASCII based WWW browser.
Also, commercial UNIX servers from SUN, HP
and IBM were the backbone of the early WWW.
Linux was not ready for prime time in the
early nineties. More DEC VAX's were in
use as critical infrastructure in the early
nineties.
I did work at a Swiss Polytech in 1995
trying to get some software I had
written to work on their system. They and
almost all of the Swiss Polytech. system was still
beholden to the SUN god for their internet server
infrastructure (APACHE + SUN). If it's good
enough for the Swiss it must be good.
This Eurozine writer is writing alternate history.
Posted by: J.H. at July 6, 2004 9:13 AMBloody arrogant Euros. Don't they know Mr. Gore invented it?
Posted by: Peter B at July 6, 2004 10:09 AMRe: inventing HTML, it is a subset of SGML (Standard Graphic Markup Language), devised by DOD as a way for complex technical manuals to be independent of the word processing hardware / operating system used to create or view them.
The ideal of Universal Resource Locators started at Xerox's PARC labs. Berners-Lee did simplify SGML and link it to the idea of URLS.
OSI died a well-deserved death. I implemented levels 2 and 3 of the protocol stack years ago (mid 70s), which are the equivalent of IP& TCP. They worked fine, the upper levels (very mainframe and bureaucratic in tone) were a mess.
MP3 was indeed invented in Europe - after MP1 and MP2 were evolved .....
This is typical Euro posturing. I've been hearing for 30 years about how Europe is going to overtake the US in technology and engineering, any day now ....
Posted by: Robin Burk at July 6, 2004 3:54 PM