Http Protocol

I spent the evening at the 92Y, listening to an interview with Tim Berners-Lee about the history of his crowning achievement at CERN: the “web”. Coincidentally, I had just finished reading Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think in which he seems to predict the type of system Berners-Lee developed, almost 50 years before the fact.

The entirety of As We May Think is uncanny and funny, but most prescient of all is Bush’s idea of a “Memex” - a device that links together material through “paths” that can be codified, saved, and re-trodden at will. Of this he says:

This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

The idea would eventually be taken up by Ted Nelson, who coined the Hyperlink, and then tried to codify it in the now-defunct Xanadu project. Of this, Berners-Lee said:

The reason Xanadu failed was it was siloed. The web was about interpersonal computation - the goal was to share across systems.

And so, what becomes clear to me is that the development of the HTTP protocol and the web as we know it has more to with with protocolizing these shared channels, and doing so in a decentralized way. The brilliance of HTTP, which seems obvious in retrospect, is that it divested truth and authority from any one single source, creating memex-like ways of traversing this universe. The alternative was a centralized, monetized, and insular web, and alternative protocols like Gopher suffered by entertaining the allure of financial mechanisms.