Tim Berners-Lee on the Right to Link .... from way back as 1997
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 4:19PM
Administrator

Myths are dispelled in this quite revealing piece of internet history started by Tim Berners-Lee in 1997. It puts the current debates in perspective.

We tend to forget that search engines - which are what enable us to find interesting web content that we might want to link to in the first place - predate the internet as we know it today . Search engines have evolved in DNA-like fashion from the days of lists maintained by people like Tim Berners-Lee on CERN, to early programs like Archie, the first search program written by a student and Gopher  (1991, even I remember that, I hate to admit!) to all the variants we now know today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

What the newspapers are doing is tantamount to blocking the lifeblood of the Internet. It is like deliberately introducing thrombosis in an otherwise healthy organism.

Article originally appeared on right2link (http://www.right2link.org/).
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