Tim Berners-Lee speaking in Wellington NZ

Tim Berners-Lee is making a presentation in Wellington on Wednesday 30th Jan from 5:00pm-6:30pm entitled The open Internet and the World Wide Web. If you can't attend the Wellington event it is being streamed live to OGGB3/260-092 & OGGB4/260-073 lecture theatres at the University of  Auckland. Those interested in attending the live stream gatherings are encouraged to sign up here.

In praise of... #Olympics, the NeXTcube & Steve #Jobs

I just criticized Danny Boyle for missing the golden opportunity of including Alan Turing in the Olympic opening ceremony. However, he deserves praise for the accuracy with which Sir Tim Berners-Lee was presented. As the loop above shows Berners-Lee is using a NeXTcube computer, just like the one on which he famously programmed the world's first web server at CERN. 
    The NeXTcube was in 1990 a powerful workstation created by NeXT  Inc., the company that Steve Jobs formed in 1985 after he was forced out of Apple. The NeXTcube featured an object-oriented operating system called NeXTSTEP, which unlike the hardware, was highly influential. In fact Jobs was brought back into Apple when it acquired NeXT for the operating system, which is still at the core of OS X and iOS. All this history is described in more detail in several chapters in The Universal Machine.

Ian Ritchie: The day I turned down Tim Berners-Lee

I was watching some TED Talks last night and came across Ian Ritchie and his talk "The day I turned down Tim Berners-Lee." It's an entertaining short talk on the development of hypertext and the web. Well worth a watch. If you've not come across TED talks you're in for a treat, but be prepared for some late nights. I can't stop watching them into the we small hours.



Incidentally in 1992 Tim Berners-Lee's paper on the WWW was turned down from the Hypertext conference.