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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
Timothy Berners-Lee: Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalizing, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system. But then the engineering was fairly straightforward. It was designed in order to make it possible to get at documentation and in order to be able to get people -- students working with me, contributing to the project, for example -- to be able to come in and link in their ideas, so that we wouldn't lose it all if we didn't debrief them before they left. Really, it was designed to be a collaborative workspace for people to design on a system together. That was the exciting thing about it.
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
Computers changed. They had graphics. They had things like folders and "point and click," and people started to use word processors. When they used word processors, they stored their data. They typed into the word processor on a disk somewhere on a machine, which generally wasn't accessible. So there was then a new frustration that data about these systems was available, but you had to log onto a special particular machine. You had to learn a particular program to access it. To find your way through the library was totally different from finding your way through the documentation system of an experiment. So the data was there, somewhere, going around and around on a disk, but it was really difficult to get at. So there was a mixture, a confluence of ideas, I suppose -- the frustration that we didn't have access to the data that existed, even though it was there -- the need for a collaborative environment. I wanted something like Enquire, but where everybody could play, so that people working together could design something in a common shared space.
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
My mother was one of the earliest programmers. My father, he worked in London, but he took the train up to Manchester a whole lot, increasingly as he got to know my mother. Then they moved down to London, and then they had me. Ferranti's had an office in Putney, which later became International Computers and Tabulators and then International Computers Limited. So they started off when there was all of the excitement when the second register was added to the computer, a second accumulator. So I think when they started, all of these mathematicians were full of the idea that what you could do with the computer was limited only by your imagination, and you could prove that. If somebody else built another computer which was fancier, you could program your computer to emulate that computer, and therefore, your computer could do whatever their computer could do. So it's just a question of the imagination you can put into the program, and that is quite a challenge. I think later on, with network information systems, people felt the same thing, this "Wow! We can build huge systems!" Now on the web, what you can do with building a web site, what you can do building a new web application, is limited only by your imagination. That's the challenge that's out there for people today.
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
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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Benazir Bhutto
Former Prime Minister of Pakistan
Now when I look back on it, it was my father who was against the gender constraints of my time. And my mother, she used to be a working woman herself, she joined the National Guards. She was a captain in the National Guards. She was the first woman in Karachi to own a car and to drive, and people used to talk about her because they said, you know, "We're not supposed to drive cars." But when I look back on it, it was my mother who taught that a woman grew up to be married and to have children, and she would tell my father in front of me, "Why do you want to educate her? No man will want to marry her." So all the time, for her, success depended on having a good catch as a husband, and having children. Whereas for my father, he broke free of those constraints, and he insisted that I have an education. He said, "Boys and girls are equal. I want my daughter to have the same opportunities."
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Benazir Bhutto
Former Prime Minister of Pakistan
I thought my mother would be the prime minister, and that I'd work for her to be the prime minister, and that's what I did. But my mother got sick and actually she had lung cancer, but we didn't know she was getting Alzheimer's. So she started behaving differently and we thought it's because she's had this serious illness, and she's reflecting on how to lead her life. And suddenly I found that since mommy was away and the whole party was about to collapse unless I was there, so I started looking after the party at that stage. When I went back, I remember people were shouting, "Prime Minister Benazir!" And suddenly it struck me that "looking after" means -- with mommy ill -- "looking after" means that I will be the prime minister. So it was in that sort of moment when I realized the responsibility that I had taken over could lead me all the way to an office that could govern the destiny of more than 100 million Muslims in Pakistan.
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Benazir Bhutto
Former Prime Minister of Pakistan
I grew up in a region full of powerful women and I thought, "Well if they can do it, I can do it too." But when I used to talk to others they would say, "You're mad. How can a woman succeed?" Not necessarily in politics, but I wanted to be a diplomat. I wanted to have my own newspaper. You know, I wanted to do things, and other people -- men and women -- would find that very surprising, so others doubted it. Even my own husband, when he married me, he thought I was under delusions that I could beat a military dictator, and he thought that, "When she wakes up and finds out that it's all wrong and she can't, then I'll be there to console her." Little knowing that I was the one who had to console him when I won.
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