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Another interesting New York Times article (Senate Approves 2-Year Extension of Bush’s Tax Cuts – May 11, 2006)

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 54 to 44 to approve $70 billion in tax cuts benefiting, no surprise here, the country’s wealthiest taxpayers.

To put it in perspective, here is an excerpt from the NY Times article:

The overwhelming share of the tax cuts the Senate voted to extend will flow to the wealthiest taxpayers. People earning $1 million a year would save about $42,700, and reap about 22 percent of the total tax cut, according to the Tax Policy Center, a research group in Washington. People earning $40,000 to $50,000 a year would save about $47 and receive less than 1 percent of the benefits.

I think, just maybe, that the folks that voted for GW and the Republicans in Congress may finally be realizing that they’ve been taken to the cleaners. Unless you are among the tiny percentage of Americans who’s income is more than $1 million per year, you are getting royally screwed.

GW came into office with a budget surplus and we have had nothing but disasters of every kind ever since. We now have the largest budget deficits in history, GW’s self-inflicted war in Iraq is costing us $100’s of billions per year, more than 2,000 US soldiers and marines have died, Home Land Security is a laughing stock, Osama is still out there, and oh, by the way, GW and his Republican buddies in the House and Senate are going to leave office having made sure that they and their wealthy cronies won’t have to pay for it… The average US taxpayer will.

Outside of the techie world, remarkably few people know the history of the Internet and the World Wide Web… Or even understand the distinction between them. I am certainly not an authority on either but I have “grown up” with both.

Back in the 70’s, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) saw the potential value of networking computers together. They funded the development of a network architecture by a mixture of private companies (e.g. Bolt, Beranek, & Neuman) and various academic institutions. My understanding is that they specifically asked for an architecture that would resist the loss of various nodes due to battle damage. The result was a network (called ARPANET) that tied together computers at federally-funded academic institutions, military facilities, and government research labs. The networking protocol that was used is called TCP/IP. Ironically, no ARPANET or Internet node has every been destroyed in battle but the battle-resistant architecture has proven to be reasonably well suited to dealing with the loss of nodes due to routine equipment failure. [Hmm, maybe the resistance to battle damage requirement is a myth... According to the Resource Center for Internet History, ARPA developed the Internet for purely scientific purposes with no intent for military use.]

For the first couple of decades, ARPANET (later the Internet) was known to, and used by, a few thousand academic and military types. The primary use was for email and file transfers.

In the late 80’s, the government decided to open up the Internet for public and commercial use. It is largely forgotten now but this was quite controversial. The priviledged elite who had used the Internet up to that point objected to masses of unwashed newbies getting access to the network.

Of course the real revolution was not the opening up of the Internet for public use. After all, the average person saw little use for email or electronic file transfers. The real revolution was the development of the World Wide Web by an obscure Englishman called Tim Berners-Lee. He was working for CERN which is a multi-national physics laboratory sponsored by the European Union (roughly corresponding to one of the US Governments national laboratories like Lawrence Livermore or Argonne).

His intent was simply to provide a means for sharing documents (physics papers, primarily) among the staff of CERN which numbered in the thousands and which was located at a number of different sites around Europe. All these sites were networked using the TCP/IP Internet and he built a computer architecture that layered on top of TCP/IP and allowed people to publish information on a server on one part of the Internet that could be viewed by someone else using a client browser at a remote location.

Berners-Lee apparently had no plans to “change the world” but he was a very competent programmer and designed an architecture that was scalable, robust, and very flexible. The same architecture he designed to serve the needs of a few thousand people in Western Europe in the late 1980’s is still being used… But now it is being used by millions of people across the planet. We now use it buy products, make travel arrangements, check the weather, read the news, publish our opinions, settle bets, and a million other day-to-day tasks.

In my opinion, no single individual can have had as great an impact on technology, business, and politics in as short a time as Tim Berners-Lee but hardly anyone knows his name.