Timothy Berners-Lee Interview (page: 5 / 8) Father of the World Wide Web	Print Interview

We all take the web for granted now. We use it every day without thinking about it, but somebody had to think of it and realize its potential and usefulness and how to achieve it. How did you do that?

Timothy Berners-Lee: I think the creative process is fascinating. One, because it's essential to progress. Two, because it's really exciting. I get a kick out of designing something, making something that works. I think we all do. We have different forms of creativity, but just as we get a kick out of skiing down a mountain or eating sugar, we get this visceral -- I don't know whether it's a dump of dopamine or what. People will tell us soon what it is, but we get it from solving a problem, from things falling into shape.

It's interesting, the creative moment. The creative process, I should say, which is not a moment. I think it 's a long-term process. I think what's interesting about it is the way it's inaccessible to us. We can think of a lot of thoughts, but if we think too closely about the creative process, if we put our thoughts in too much order on the page, nothing comes. That's when you get your writer's block. That's fine for writing a recipe. It's fine for writing a manual for how to put a car together. But if you're trying to think of something new, or you're trying to write a poem, you have to let everything flow. The ideas have to be half-formed, and half-formed ideas, we don't have language to express well.

They float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it's better. Then the more mechanical part takes over and turns it into program. I think that's exciting too, if you get a kick out of that too. I think it's fun to take the half-formed idea. I think it would be really nice if we could do this, if this program were to be able to do that. I think it's great. It's a challenge, really, to think, "Okay. I can now tell you how to write the code to do that. We're going to have these types of objects, and we're going to take this interface apart this way, so now you're going to be able to look at it this way, and we're going to make it a whole lot simpler, because otherwise we'll add too much complexity..." All that sort of process is really interesting too. But...

What people describe as the "Aha!" moment, the "eureka" moment, I think this idea of it being a moment, I'm very suspicious of. I don't actually believe that Archimedes sat in the bath, saw the water up, and said "Eureka!" I think he probably tried all kinds of things. He tried ways of filling the crown full of little marbles maybe and counting the marbles. Goodness knows what. No, he tried all kinds of ways of estimating its volume. And then he figured, "Ah goodness! Yeah. Water will do it!" But he'd done a lot of preparation, and he probably had a lot of ideas pretty close to it. And in fact, it didn't happen -- (snaps). If you'd started him off on the problem totally fresh and sat him in the bath, nothing would have happened. It wouldn't have happened without him discussing the problem with people, without him starting to form all of these hypotheses, half-formed things.
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I think one of the challenges now is how can we do that better in groups. That's where I was coming from with the web originally. I wanted it to be something which would allow us to work together, design things together. Now, the really interesting part of the design is when we have lots of people all over the planet, for example, who have part of it in their heads. They have parts of the cure for AIDS, part of an understanding of cancer.

Mankind does not have -- humankind, excuse me -- does not have an understanding of cancer, but we have all of these half-formed ideas. Can we somehow use the web to transmit those half-formed ideas? Can we make it a space where I can leave a trail? Express to you my half-formed ideas in such a way that you, who have the other part of it -- or can see how to take it next -- can see that, pick it up, without still having a solution to the problem, and then take it on to somebody else, or add a little piece to it, contribute your piece? So that after a while, eventually, somebody manages to put all the pieces together and solve one of these really big problems which we've got before us now.
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I finished a sentence! Rare thing, huh?

All these other questions aside, what motivates you?

Timothy Berners-Lee: What motivates a human being? I think the excitement of solving problems motivates me. Working with other people, the excitement of doing things together, it's a fairly visceral sort of thing. I enjoy working with students who have got lots of fresh ideas. I enjoy working with people who have been in the business for ages and who have got lots of new wisdom about it all. There are other things -- like flying all over the world persuading people that something is going to be a good idea -- which I find that I am not so good at. I'm not a natural fund-raiser. I'm not a natural for explaining to somebody why they need to use this technology, which is what we have to do now with the Semantic Web. I'm back in the same place as I was with the web in 1991. So...

In 1991, '92, every day I'd have to decide whether to write some code, or go and persuade somebody else to write some code, or write some documentation, or persuade somebody else to write some documentation, or go and give a motivating talk somewhere explaining what the whole thing is supposed to be about, or try to argue with administration for funds or resources or whatever it takes. Today, everything -- the same sort of choices exist all the time, and I have to balance my time and find more things. Some things are more motivating than others, but I find to stay sane I have to keep working with other people, and I have to keep programming. I have to keep involved with the actual design.
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Other people might have seen this work as a way to become very rich, but you chose to make the web free and available to everybody. Did you ever consider turning it into a commercial enterprise?

Timothy Berners-Lee: Well, let's get this little myth out of the way. No, I couldn't have been rich. I'm not a very good entrepreneur, for one thing. Secondly, the whole ethos of the people who designed the Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force, was a sharing of new ideas, bootstrapping, making systems which would allow us to communicate in such a way that we can then design systems even better. So now we have e-mail, or now we have net news, or now we have the HTTP. The whole ethos was of sharing. The idea of patenting it and trying to run off with the keys to the cars was not part of the world in which I lived. And also, had I done it, I knew very clearly that everybody would have dropped it like a hot potato.

The people who were crucial to the pickup of the web were, for example, people in companies who probably had day jobs, but were doing this out of interest, engineers who were picking it up. If there had been patents around it, their lawyers would have told them not to even read the code, not to download it, not to install it, not to read anything about it, in case they were tainted by something which would allow the company later to be sued. So similarly, somebody else in their garage or their basement, just doing it for fun, they're doing it because they think it would be really exciting. Because they share the twinkle in their eye, they understand what it would be like if everybody had a web server, or if everybody had a web page and everybody had a web browser. So they're some of the people who do it because it would be cool if everybody did it. Right?
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People who are doing that are not going to do it if the work will actually be intellectual property belonging to this or that company. The web relied, and still relies, on people contributing because they know it's an open, common system. They know this is the commons. This is our common grazing ground. It's our common thoroughfare. It's a space that we're using together. They are only contributing because of that. When we make new developments like the data protocols, the Data Web, Semantic Web, same thing again. Everybody is excited about the new things which can happen when everything you can do on a computer, you can now do on a phone, as we move towards the mobile web. Whole new markets open up.

Everybody realized that these new markets, these new spaces, these new ideas -- there will be new spaces of things in which other things will be built -- but they will depend on the basic web infrastructure being royalty-free. It's always been like that. Every now and again, we've had a hiccup when somebody didn't understand it, when somebody thought that maybe they'd try to make a quick killing by somehow getting a stranglehold on it, somehow finding a way to be able to limit your access -- everybody's access -- to the web, and then they would be able to charge for it. Yeah. You can see they had a different gleam in their eyes. But rapidly, they found that really people treated them with the utmost contempt and programmed around them, went around them, and left them, having learned a lesson, and generally picking up the pieces and moving on and joining this world of openness, of open standards, of royalty-free standards.
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