The Mystical Way of Links

Links, links, links. Happy [Link Loving] Web Day, being the 36th birthday of the World Wide Web, as it needed to be named at that time. As a well established adult at that age, you are confiden— okay enough web anthropomorphizing.

One of those things I tag as webserendipity happened a few days ago, and as if by magic I did not get to until Web BDay.

The Story Starts in my Inbox

After a wonderful week of doing some remix collaboration for Open Education Week with Bryan Mathers of course I still did not need motivation reading the newsletter sent March 8 – Man checks in with REFLECTO-GLYPHS. Not that I would have the dedication to do so, his use of small sketches in a daily journal or glyphs to chart his energy, weather, etc is inspiring. Plus Bryan ties it back (a memory link) to a story of a similar activity he did in school.

It was literally a few minutes later in scanning my Mastodon feed I spotted someone’s repost from a person I do not know or follow:

Honestly I might have just scrolled by and skipped the click, but this person named didn’t just repost, or say “this is cool” he cleverly frame it in a humorous reference. But maybe it was also his mention of pocket calendars that triggered my link reflex. And oh what a wonderful diversion this story of Medieval wildly folding pocket calendars from the British Library was full of glyph symbols was a worthy click indeed. Heck, I even discover there is an entire blog for Medieval Manuscripts.

So to add one link, I decided to reply to the email that Bryan’s newsletter sends. Do you ever do that? It goes directly to the person who sent it, imagine how happy they are to get an honest response directly from a reader. You’d be surprise at how many will reply with gratitude and more, even if they do not know you (but in this case Bryan and I have had many interactions).

I shared the link with him, natch. To which he replies:

Well now – as luck would have it – Lambeth Palace is but a stones throw away from where I live – so I shall have to visit this exhibition and unravel the ancient mysteries for myself! 

Thanks for the idea!

The next link in the story may happen (or not) when Bryan walks that stone thrown distance.

This is just a “wee” story as the tall guy would say, but thinking about the links, not all of which are <a href= "...."> hyperlinks, but the human and almost accidental kind, that to me is what the web (the broadest kind) is made of.

TBL’s Day of The Idea

Back to March 12, 1989. What were you doing then? That precedes my block clock and my flickr photo chronology, so I can only guess. Heck I was still a grad student in Geology at Arizona State University.

On this day aka a few hours ago, I saw a Mastodon (again) reference to the Web Birthday, linking to a Vox story from 2019, which was the big turning into the 30s celebration, The World Wide Web — not the internet — turns 30 years old.

Because I notice things, that is the title of the story as displayed on the screen. But if you are one of the few who reads details in URLs, or sees this in a web search result, or OMG views source and reads the <title>...</title> tags, you can note that while celebrating the day in text, the article serves to Lord of SEO juice as it’s real title is “Google Doodle celebrates the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web”.

And indeed Google’s Doodle for this day, while very clever, is the featured image and cited in thoe first paragraph.

The article does a surface broad coverage and does try to separate the often tanging of the web and the internet, or referencing the birth of the web in relation to email and GIFs and video games. Heck they even stretch back to Charles Babbage for the early computer tick point, the internet start portions of Kleinrock, Roberts, Kahn, and Cerf (my gosh that comes off like the name of a law firm). They skipped over Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think – written in 1945 and that link I used has not budged- and more.

It seems a bit sour that they put so much tie in to Google, but I will drop that for now because I am sure I lost the 12 people who might have started reading this.

But today is the day he submitted his proposal (still on the web) Information Management: A Proposal which at the time his working name was “Mesh”. And the legendary story was his “bosses” he submitted this document 36 years ago returned it wth the hand written teacher-like comment “Vague but Exciting”

I have used this story a number of times, going back to 2014 for a talk about the almost magic of the web Do You Ever Wonder What Happened to Wonder? (rather put into scale by 2025). I played in my discovering that Tim Berners-Lee was influenced as a child by a very web-like book called Enquire Within Upon Everything. The connections of the web are strands that weave way back.

Part of my talk was speculating what if that “boss” had written “Vague and get back to that programming task.” And in other retells of this same bit, like me, I never wondered about who that boss was, often, like I did he was unnamed although it’s clearly there on the original source of the CERN image used above.

I got these retellings by searching on web proposal vague exciting and at least a number of them references this “boss” as someone named Mike Sendall, a name even that rings of the internet function of email. Who is Mike Sendall? Off to the search I go and here is the gold link, again like the Medieval Blog link above, comes from the British Library, The untold story of the birth of World Wide Web: putting the record straight.

And here is the story gobstopper, while Mike Sendall gets maybe some of the credit for penning “Vague But Exciting” as much of the story goes to, appropriately a few days past International Womens Day, Elsie ?Peggie’ Rimmer (indeed she is absent from Wikipedia, I have a new task for Women in Red, but feel free to get there first). Rimmer was a physicist at CERN and colleague, later wife of Mike Sendall

In 1984 the CERN scientist Dr Elsie ?Peggie’ Rimmer made a staff appointment that would change history. She helped recruit a young British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee to join her group. A rare woman physicist in a male dominated field, Peggie was an expert in computer standards and became Berners-Lee’s supervisor during the years when he was developing his concept of a World Wide Web. In 2019 Peggie recorded her life story for An Oral History of British Science*, covering her memories of the birth of the web, and a short interview for the latest National Life Stories Annual Review*.

https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2020/12/the-untold-story-of-the-birth-of-world-wide-web-putting-the-record-straight.html

*both links dead and not findable, I did download the referenced remarks where Peggy talks a bout more about her relationship with Tim Berners-Lee.

Read on from there to understand how it was the work/research/exploration environment that both Sendall and Rimmer created at CERN that nurtured young Sir TBL.

The real story is that Mike Sendall’s “Vague but exciting” comment was not even meant for Tim Berners-Lee to see much less the world, and also a very painful tale (read it yourself, deep linked) of what that meant for all these people, indeed a story lost buried but not unfindable. If you did.

Everytime I go back to the web and scrape a little more, I find more and more strands that come together. These are not served up by al algorithm that “answers” by doing statistical averages of word use. Most of my key links come from the edges of my search, but things not quite statistically related but tangentially.

Indeed, all this “links” more than just the hypertext ones are As I May Think, its associate trails again and again, and can never be encapsulated by a machine process. And it does, well it’s not a mirage. A machine cannot feel excitement nor wonder.

Happy web day, all y’all!

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Featured Image: Mine. What generate cartoons when I got real photos? 2016/366/292 The Web is a Tentative Thing flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)