Word: texts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...helped create the postwar military-industrial-university complex. But the onetime professor at M.I.T.--where he built a massive, gear-driven analog computer called the differential analyzer--was also a prophet. In 1945, dismayed by the wartime info overload, he proposed a desktop machine, the "memex," that would display text and pictures (from a microfilm library) at the press of a button. Presciently, Bush envisioned users of his proto-PC following trails of knowledge along storable hypertext "links," much like today's Web surfers...
After the war, he returned to the I.A.S. and became obsessed with computing. Von Neumann's vision for the machines went beyond the rote arithmetic tasks for which they were originally designed. In his idealized computer, the same memory units that held data items, such as numbers or text, also held the step-by-step instructions that would allow the machine to be programmed to perform any task. Von Neumann persuaded the I.A.S.'s somewhat skeptical board of trustees to allocate $100,000--quite a sum in 1945--to build the MANIAC, the first in a series of early...
...between, there is some tough sledding. Wittgenstein draws a distinction between what can be said, using words, and what can only be shown, and this raises the inevitable question: Does the Tractatus, as a text, say things that can't be said? Maybe. The next-to-last proposition is a famous shocker: "6.54. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these...
...cobbled together a relatively easy-to-learn coding system--HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language)--that has come to be the lingua franca of the Web; it's the way Web-content creators put those little colored, underlined links in their text, add images and so on. He designed an addressing scheme that gave each Web page a unique location, or url (universal resource locator). And he hacked a set of rules that permitted these documents to be linked together on computers across the Internet. He called that set of rules HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol...
...think he would have at least got rich; he had plenty of opportunities. But at every juncture, Berners-Lee chose the nonprofit road, both for himself and his creation. Marc Andreessen, who helped write the first popular Web browser, Mosaic--which, unlike the master's browser, put images and text in the same place, like pages in a magazine--went on to co-found Netscape and become one of the Web's first millionaires. Berners-Lee, by contrast, headed off in 1994 to an administrative and academic life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From a sparse office at M.I.T...