Foreword to the Paperback Edition

By Tim Berners-Lee

As a visionary and leader, Michael Dertouzos took as his job not only to lead in the right direction but also to make sure that everyone understood that direction. This included everyone, expert or not. He was a teacher as well as a technologist. His vision was not just one for technology, but for humanity. And he addressed, most importantly, the relationship between the two.

Though, alas, we must speak of Michael in the past tense, his death last summer, while natural, was early and a surprise. This book, which he had just finished, is not of the past. The revolution described in these pages is something in full swing. The urgencies that Michael saw as he wrote apply absolutely to us all now. We don’t have him with us to drive home the points personally, so we will just have to imagine him, as we turn these pages, perhaps on stage at the World Economic Forum gently teasing Bill Gates, or perhaps in jovial but earnest conversation over lunch with his pen and little notepad ready next to his plate.

Everyone who met Michael knows that as a person he connected very directly with others at a raw, visceral level. I first met him in a café in Zurich, Switzerland, at a time when I was looking at possibilities about the future of the World Wide Web. Michael’s approach of putting the good intentions face up on the table firmly and with unilateral commitment was disarming, delightful, and a rock-solid foundation for what became the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based initially at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT. In Michael, I found someone committed to computer and communications in service to humanity. I met someone committed to and appreciative of the cultural diversity which makes our world so rich. I found someone who exuded the spirit and confidence to enable those around him to recognize and do what they dreamed of.

This book helps us step back. It is so easy to get caught up in the excitement of the latest technological development, a fantastic Web site or a more dazzling computer display. These things are inherently appealing to the tool-building urge that evolution has given us. We are entranced by the exciting possibilities of the new building blocks. Sometimes, though, it is wise to pause in this headlong creative rush to wonder whether all the things we are weaving together are making any sense in the long term and on a larger scale. Michael was constantly doing this, demanding to know what passion lay behind the surface excitement, and where was the real benefit to humanity. He would keep discussions at LCS focused on the principle that it is not technology, but technology for humanity.

You can read the book to get the full picture from Michael, but I will mention some ways in which this message, that the revolution of the World Wide Web, for example.

The bane of my life is the implication that it broke upon the public consciousness in the mid-1990s and indeed, like a breaking wave lifted us all up, and then dropped us (at least the .com speculators) on the sand again. Before the wave, it was so difficult to explain to people what the Web was all about, during it there was a huge “ah-ha!” and, after it, the thought that it is over, understood. Many people assumed that the Web was, in its plan and in its entirety, whatever particular facet of it they first met. But this is far from true.

I look at computers as improving in three ways – by helping us to communicate better with each other, by helping with the actual processing of date, and by being less of a pain in the process. In none of these areas are we anywhere near the level we can imagine.

As a communication medium, computers provide a mixture of different media. The Web was supposed to have been a collaborative medium, but most of the way it is now used is as a one-way publication medium. The plan was to get to the point in which a group of people could collaborate on a project across the Web, like a family sitting around a table making a photograph album. E-mail coexists with the Web in a friendly but arm’s length existence. (Haven’t you ever wanted to link to an email or reply to a Web page?) Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and the other forms of instant messaging fill the void of instantness, but are poor from multimedia point of view.

At the other end of the scale, we have very patchy results in the area of getting machines to do our “heavy lifting” for us. In general, we are hampered in the world of data by the fact that the data in calendars, address books, and financial accounts and other databases are isolated – each application is an island, unable to benefit from the knowledge held by others. When you manually copy information about a meeting from a Web page into your appointment diary, you are the human servicing the computer just as Michael describes.

We make progress, step by step.

Nowadays, when I have meetings with colleagues at the W3C, we talk on a telephone conference bridge named after the local Zakim bridge. The people on the phone bridge can attend at the same time in a chat room, which parallels the spoken meeting. Zakim, the phone bridge, with bit of hacking by Ralph Swick at LCS, appears as a robot presence in the chat room. Zakim knows who is on the call, and can also help mute noisy lines and dial people into the call. At the same time, he keeps a list of people wanting to speak, and tracks the agenda for the meeting, taking on some of the role of meeting recorder. Zakim also keeps a list of the current conferences and who is on which conference on a virtual Web page. That Web page is in the Semantic Web “RDF” language, designed to be read by other agents.

In the daily life of the Consortium, the domains of different agents are beginning to overlap enough to be useful. The organization chart connects to the list of working groups. The list of working groups connect to the mailing list system, and to the list of documents. The list of documents connects to the access control system, which has lists of groups, which connect to the mailing list system again. Link by link the Semantic Web of data is beginning to form in our organization. We are starting to build agents that will exchange data and be aware of security and privacy. We have such a long way to go but the area is full of tantalizing possibilities. Every few days a new link is put in; a bright idea combines information from here and from there, and provides new insight, new help in some way. The last thing to do is imagine that the information revolution is over.

We have, in computers, a white, infinite canvas….we can make computers do anything we can imagine. That is a mathematical face. Any aspect of the way we use computers, the way computers present themselves to us, is the result of our programming. There are some interesting fundamental constraints on what is possible, which mathematicians make it their job to explore, but within those bounds, we are totally in control. We have no one else to blame. There is no reason that computers have qwerty keyboards, or keyboards at all, except that someone thought they were a good idea. The same goes for window systems, menus and “Save As” dialog boxes. Many other domains of human endeavor may be limited by the total amount of land on the planet’s surface, and harsh realities of human life. But the computing space is one that is ours for the creating. In computer science, inactive whining is not in order. One person can build a complete computer system out of software whose kit of parts - the source code of all the constituent programs – is available on the Internet. So any person on the ‘Net’ is in a position to fix what they don’t like. And we as a race are free to make the Web the place we really want it to be. Those are the challenges that this remarkable art has thrown to us. Humanity’s response to them will define its destiny in the next millennium. It is wise to think about where we would really like to be and how to get there. That is what Michael Dertouzos does in this book.