michael thevenet on Wed, 1 Apr 2009 17:41:03 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> nettime-l Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1


Hi! Patrice,

no comment about your translation, just two nanopieces of history.

1. Graph Theory encountered its first enormous burst during the  
nineteenth century when people tried to put in place the electricity  
grid.

2. Why TBL named his project WWW ? Here's his own answer:

>Q: Why did you call it WWW?
>
>A: Looking for a name for a global hypertext system, an essential  
>element I wanted to stress was its decentralized form allowing  
>anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a graph,  
>or web.  It was designed to be global of course. (I had noticed that  
>projects find it useful to have a signature letter, as the Zebra  
>project at CERN which started all its variables with "Z".  In fact  
>by the time I had decided on WWW, I had written enough code using  
>global variables starting with "HT" for hypertext that W wasn't used  
>for that.).  Alternatives I considered were "Mine of  
>information" ("Moi", c'est un peu egoiste) and "The Information Mine  
>("Tim", even more egocentric!), and "Information Mesh" (too like  
>"Mess" though its ability to describe a mess was a requirement!).   
>Karen Sollins at MIT now has a Mesh project.

(source: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#Spelling)

Cheers,
m


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