Charles Jannuzi wrote:
>
> I would argue that if you take in enough of the breadth and depth of this
> man's vision and accomplishments, you would see that he is easily on the
> same level as Tim Berners-Lee.
>
ravi replied:
>i am curious: what do you think is the >breadth and depth of
>berners-lee's vision and accomplishments? i >ask because i applaud the
>man for initiating the web but i do not see >much reason to credit him
>for its raging success (if at all such individual >credit is due, a fair
>share has to go to the mosaic team at ncsa >since the GUI is what i
>believe helped the web succeed over more >sophisticated contemporary
>technologies such as gopher) and it is >difficult to think of the
>original html spec and the http protocol as a >great technical
>accomplishment. i am not trying to "diss" the >poor man... i think my
>view might be jaundiced by my narrowly >technical blinders. hence my
>curiosity about yours...
You only have to read Bill Gates 'The Road Ahead' to see how much he got it wrong, and look how rich and famous he is. If Bill would have his way, you'd all be hardwired into MSN paying his fees, and the Internet would still be a curiousity of gophers and usenets littered with 'scientists' swapping porno pics (though some saw the immediate commercial application here). I help to produce two print publications --non-profit, I don't even draw a salary--and the text-based openness of the WWW has been a true godsend. We find readers but we also find WRITERS. If only we could find a way to cover our costs.
Well, the commercialization of the Internet probably should be attributed to the man who claimed to invent it or something like that--Al Gore. T Berners-Lee is still trying to keep the Net out of anyone group's hands, and he still hasn't sold out.
People in the States and the world over know who Bill Gates is (and if they are really into it, people like the kooky guys at Oracle or Sun Microsystems). I would have used Linus Torvalds as a comparison, but Sakamura thought of his Tron project when Torvalds was playing with an Atari.
OK, so I back down here. Prof. Sakamura is in a class by himself. And as he has repeatedly pointed out, in the States, the only thing that gets recognition and fame is immediate success, and that is not what the Tron project is about. Besides, isn't there some sort of victory that American, Japanese and European use of electronics outside the balky desktop or notebook computer relies extensively on TRON, but most don't even know it exists. Prof. Sakamura would say, that is the way an OS is supposed to be!
Charles Jannuzi