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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I always used to tell young officers -- since I entered battle as an officer, I never experienced it as a soldier -- I told them, "You are lucky to become officers in operations since officers have to care about what happens with their unit. They have a commitment to lead. So you will be always under the burden of identifying what happens, deciding what should be done, issuing orders, and looking around at someone following them -- that something happens and then it changes the situation. And the other side also is acting and everything is flowing around you and you have to continuously keep it running. What is your situation? What is happening? What should be done about it? How to spread the orders and how to watch they are fulfilled?"
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I really felt that somehow when many others lose their sense of directions, or the skyline, or the contours of all the hills around look the same, that I feel that I know where to go. And something similar happened to me many times during the height of a battle. I feel that somehow I can look at it not just out of my own body as an individual that cares about himself, but I can look at it from the outside in a certain -- in a way to -- during the battle at certain aspects it was less kind of hurting you from your stomach than before. When before you are idle, when you have nothing to do but to contemplate what could happen, you become more kind of irritated than once it begins. You have a role. You have something to do. It is dependent upon you. You have to keep yourself detached a little bit looking at all the pictures, giving orders, otherwise your people will be lost and your unit will be lost, and you will lose. And somehow this kind of feeling that I can see -- I can see what happens, I do not lose sight of what happens all around, what should be done, and I do not get panicked -- is what kind of encourages me to keep doing it.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
On the battlefield itself, no one will move if you are not moving. I used to tell my company commanders "If I, the battalion commander, will not go to a fire position, open fire and then give commands, no one will move. And if you company commanders will not be the first one to climb to fire position, every other tank crew will find some excuse not to climb, and we have to do it the first time." You don't have time. You somehow -- I believe that many good commanders in the field just somehow can make their overall judgment very quickly. I can compare it to something in which I'm very weak but I watch it. The way that tennis players are responding. They're not calculating. If you were to write the Newtonian equations of the moving of the tennis ball, what you should have done, or not to mention the Schrödinger equations of it, you will never end it. You've got to do what should be done and you don't assess whether you should do it this way or this way, just do what should be done.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I believe that I found from early youth that meaning could be found only in something that goes beyond your own kind of frame of skin and bones, and even self-interest. If something is serving you, if you can get the ultimate kind of domestic or self-indulgent situation, it will not satisfy you, I believe -- most human beings, I know for sure about myself -- for very long. It is only through something that seems to be important, meaningful, has to do with a wider group of human beings, and leave some imprint beyond your body, and in a way, beyond your time. That makes life meaningful. And that somehow -- I was born in a kind of mobilized society as I see it in retrospect, you know, it was a society shaping. A very strong feeling, unspoken feeling, that we are facing history, that we are fulfilling the dreams of generations of Jews, especially immediately after the Holocaust in my formative years when the remnants of the Holocaust were still coming.
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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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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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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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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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