新编大学英语教程第四册Unit 05

 Network Designer----Time Berners-Lee

 

Want to see how much the world has changed in the past decade? Log on the Internet, launch a search engine and type in the word enquire¹(British spelling, please). You'll get about 30,000 hits.It turns out you can “enquire” about nearly anything online these days, from used Harley Davidsons for sale in Sydney, Australia (“Enquire about touring bikes. Click here!”), to computer-training-by-e-mail courses in India (“Where excellence² is not an act but a habit”). Click once to go to a site in Nairobi and enquire about booking shuttle reservations there. Click again, and zip off to Singapore, to a company that specializes in “ pet moving.” Enquire about buying industrial-age buts and bolts from “the Bolt Boys” in South Africa, or teddy bears in upstate New York. Exotic cigar labels! Four-poster beds for dogs!

 

So what, you say? Everybody knows that with a mouse, a modem³ and access to the Internet, these days you can point-and-click anywhere on the planet, unencumbered by time or space or long-distance phone tariffs⁴.

 

Ah, but scroll⁵ down the list far enough, hundreds of entries deep, and you’ll find this hidden Rosebud⁶ of cyberspace⁷: “Enquire Within Upon Everything”---a nifty little computer program written nearly 20 years ago by a lowly software consultant⁸ named Tim Berners-Lee. Who knew then that from this modest hack⁹ would flow the civilization-altering, millionaire-spawning, information suckhole known as the World Wide Web?

 

Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, this one truly was the work of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for the light bulb, but he had dozens of people in his lab working on it. William Shockley may have fathered the transistor¹⁰, but two of his research scientists actually built it. And if there ever was a thing that was made by committee, the Internet—with its protocols¹¹ and packet switching—is it. But the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee’s alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free.

 

It stared, of all places, in the Swiss Alps. The year was 1980. Berners-Lee, doing a six-month stint¹³ as a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, was noodling around with a way to organize his far-flung notes. He had always been interested in programs that dealt with information in a “brain-like way” but that could improve upon that occasionally memory-constrained organ. So he devised a piece of software that could, as he put it, keep “track of all the random¹⁵ associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn’t.” He called it Enquire, short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, a Victorian-era encyclopedia¹⁶ he remembered from childhood.

 

Building on ideas that were current in software design at the time, Berners-Lee fashioned a kind of “hypertext” notebook. Words in a document could be “linked” to other files on Berners-Lee’s computer; he could follow a link by number ( there was no mouse to click back then) and automatically pull up its related document. It worked splendidly in its solipsistic, Only-On-My-Computer way.

 

But what if he wanted to add stuff that resided in someone else’s computer? First he would need that person’s permission, and then he would have to do the dreary¹⁷ work of adding the new material to a central database. An even better solution would be to open up his document-and his computer-to everyone and allow them to link their stuff to his. He could limit access to his colleagues at CERN, but why stop there? Open it up to scientists everywhere! Let it span the networks! In Berbers-Lee’s scheme there would be no central manager, no central database and no scaling problems. The thing could grow like the Internet itself, open-ended and infinite. “One had to be able jump,” he later wrote, “from software documentation to a list of people to a phone book to an organizational chart to whatever.”

 

So he cobbled together a relatively¹⁸ easy-to –learn coding system-HTML (HyperText Make-up Language) ------that has come to be the lingua franca of the Web; it’s the way Web-content creators put those little colored, underlined links in their text, add images and so on. He designed an addressing scheme that gave each Web page a unique location, or URL (universal resource locator). And he hacked¹⁹ a set of rules that permitted these documents to be linked together on computers across the Internet. He called that set of rules HTTP _HyperText Transfer Protocol).

 

And on the seventh day, Berners-Lee cobbled together the World Wide Web’s first (nut not the last) browser²⁰, which allowed users anywhere to view his creation on their computer screen. In 1991 the World Wide Web debuted²¹, instantly bringing order and clarity to the chaos²² that was cyberspace. From that moment on, the Web and the Internet grew as one, often at exponential rates. Within five years, the number of Internet users jumped from 600,000 to 40 million. At one point , it was doubling every 53 days.

 

Raised in London in the 1960s, Berners-Lee was the quintessential child of the computer age. His parents met while working on the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially. They taught him to think unconventionally; he’d play games over the breakfast table with imaginary numbers (what’s the square root of minus 4?). he made pretend computers out of cardboard boxes and five-hole paper tape and fell in love with electronics. Later, at Oxford²³, he built his own working electronic computer out of spare parts and a TV set. He also studied physics, which he thought would be a lovely compromise between math and electronics. “ Physics was fun, “ he recalls. “ And in fact a good preparation for creating a global system.”

 

It’s hard to overstate the impact of the global system he created. It’s almost Gutenbergian. He took a powerful communications system that only the elite²⁴ could use and turned it into a mass medium. “If this were a traditional science, Berners-Lee would win a Nobel Prize,” Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell, once told the New York Times. “What he’s done is that significant.”

 

You’d think he would have at least got rich; he had plenty of opportunities. But at every juncture²⁵, Berners-Lee chose the nonprofit road, both for himself and his creation. Marc Andreessen, who helped write the first popular Web browser, Mosaic-which, unlike the master’s browser, put images and text in the same place, like pages in a magazine-went on to co-found Netscape and become one of the Web’s first millionaires. Berners-Lee, by contrast, headed off in 1994 to an administrative²⁶ and academic life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From a sparse²⁷ office at M.I.T., he directs the W3 Consortium, the standard-setting body that helps Netscape, Microsoft and anyone else agree on openly published protocols rather than hold one another back with proprietary¹² technology. The rest of the world may be trying to crash in on the Web’s phenomenal growth, but Berners-Lee is content to labor¹⁴ quietly in the background, ensuring that all of us can continue, well into the next century, to Enquire Within Upon Anything.

 

By Joshua Quittner

1 enquire   

v.打听，询问；调查，查问

参考例句：

• She wrote to enquire the cause of the delay.她只得写信去询问拖延的理由。
• We will enquire into the matter.我们将调查这事。

2 excellence   

n.优秀，杰出，(pl.)优点，美德

参考例句：

• His art has reached a high degree of excellence.他的艺术已达到炉火纯青的地步。
• My performance is far below excellence.我的表演离优秀还差得远呢。

3 modem   

n.调制解调器

参考例句：

• Does your computer have a modem?你的电脑有调制解调器吗？
• Provides a connection to your computer via a modem.通过调制解调器连接到计算机上。

4 tariffs   

关税制度； 关税( tariff的名词复数 )； 关税表； （旅馆或饭店等的）收费表； 量刑标准

参考例句：

• British industry was sheltered from foreign competition by protective tariffs. 保护性关税使英国工业免受国际竞争影响。
• The new tariffs have put a stranglehold on trade. 新的关税制对开展贸易极为不利。

5 scroll   

n.卷轴，纸卷；(石刻上的)漩涡

参考例句：

• As I opened the scroll,a panorama of the Yellow River unfolded.我打开卷轴时，黄河的景象展现在眼前。
• He was presented with a scroll commemorating his achievements.他被授予一幅卷轴，以表彰其所做出的成就。

6 rosebud   

n.蔷薇花蕾，妙龄少女

参考例句：

• At West Ham he was thought of as the rosebud that never properly flowered.在西汉姆他被认为是一个尚未开放的花蕾。
• Unlike the Rosebud salve,this stuff is actually worth the money.跟玫瑰花蕾膏不一样，这个更值的买。

7 cyberspace   

n.虚拟信息空间，网络空间，计算机化世界

参考例句：

• She travels in cyberspace by sending messages to friends around the world.她利用电子空间给世界各地的朋友们发送信件。
• The teens spend more time in cyberspace than in the real world of friends and family.青少年花费在电脑上的时间比他们和真正的朋友及家人在一起的时间要多。

8 consultant   

n.顾问；会诊医师，专科医生

参考例句：

• He is a consultant on law affairs to the mayor.他是市长的一个法律顾问。
• Originally,Gar had agreed to come up as a consultant.原来，加尔只答应来充当我们的顾问。

9 hack   

n.劈，砍，出租马车；v.劈，砍，干咳

参考例句：

• He made a hack at the log.他朝圆木上砍了一下。
• Early settlers had to hack out a clearing in the forest where they could grow crops.早期移民不得不在森林里劈出空地种庄稼。

10 transistor   

n.晶体管，晶体管收音机

参考例句：

• This make of transistor radio is small and beautifully designed.这半导体收音机小巧玲珑。
• Every transistor has at least three electrodes.每个晶体管至少有三个电极。

11 protocols   

n.礼仪( protocol的名词复数 )；（外交条约的）草案；（数据传递的）协议；科学实验报告（或计划）

参考例句：

• There are also protocols on the testing of nuclear weapons. 也有关于核武器试验的协议。 来自辞典例句
• Hardware components and software design of network transport protocols are separately introduced. 介绍系统硬件组成及网络传输协议的软件设计。 来自互联网

12 proprietary   

n.所有权，所有的；独占的；业主

参考例句：

• We had to take action to protect the proprietary technology.我们必须采取措施保护专利技术。
• Proprietary right is the foundation of jus rerem.所有权是物权法之根基。

13 stint   

v.节省，限制，停止；n.舍不得化，节约，限制；连续不断的一段时间从事某件事

参考例句：

• He lavished money on his children without stint.他在孩子们身上花钱毫不吝惜。
• We hope that you will not stint your criticism.我们希望您不吝指教。

14 labor   

n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦

参考例句：

• We are never late in satisfying him for his labor.我们从不延误付给他劳动报酬。
• He was completely spent after two weeks of hard labor.艰苦劳动两周后，他已经疲惫不堪了。

15 random   

adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动

参考例句：

• The list is arranged in a random order.名单排列不分先后。
• On random inspection the meat was found to be bad.经抽查，发现肉变质了。

16 encyclopedia   

n.百科全书

参考例句：

• The encyclopedia fell to the floor with a thud.那本百科全书砰的一声掉到地上。
• Geoff is a walking encyclopedia.He knows about everything.杰夫是个活百科全书，他什么都懂。

17 dreary   

adj.令人沮丧的，沉闷的，单调乏味的

参考例句：

• They live such dreary lives.他们的生活如此乏味。
• She was tired of hearing the same dreary tale of drunkenness and violence.她听够了那些关于酗酒和暴力的乏味故事。

18 relatively   

adv.比较...地，相对地

参考例句：

• The rabbit is a relatively recent introduction in Australia.兔子是相对较新引入澳大利亚的物种。
• The operation was relatively painless.手术相对来说不痛。

19 hacked   

生气

参考例句：

• I hacked the dead branches off. 我把枯树枝砍掉了。
• I'm really hacked off. 我真是很恼火。

20 browser   

n.浏览者

参考例句：

• View edits in a web browser.在浏览器中看编辑的效果。
• I think my browser has a list of shareware links.我想在浏览器中会有一系列的共享软件链接。

21 debuted   

初次表演，初次登台（debut的过去式与过去分词形式）

参考例句：

• In late 2003 a full-size SUV, the Pathfinder Armada, debuted. 2003年末，全尺寸SUV的探路者无敌舰队，推出。
• The album debuted at number two and quickly went platinum. 专辑一亮相就荣登排行榜第二名，很快就取得了白金销量。

22 chaos   

n.混乱，无秩序

参考例句：

• After the failure of electricity supply the city was in chaos.停电后，城市一片混乱。
• The typhoon left chaos behind it.台风后一片混乱。

23 Oxford   

n.牛津（英国城市）

参考例句：

• At present he has become a Professor of Chemistry at Oxford.他现在已是牛津大学的化学教授了。
• This is where the road to Oxford joins the road to London.这是去牛津的路与去伦敦的路的汇合处。

24 elite   

n.精英阶层；实力集团；adj.杰出的，卓越的

参考例句：

• The power elite inside the government is controlling foreign policy.政府内部的一群握有实权的精英控制着对外政策。
• We have a political elite in this country.我们国家有一群政治精英。

25 juncture   

n.时刻，关键时刻，紧要关头

参考例句：

• The project is situated at the juncture of the new and old urban districts.该项目位于新老城区交界处。
• It is very difficult at this juncture to predict the company's future.此时很难预料公司的前景。

26 administrative   

adj.行政的，管理的

参考例句：

• The administrative burden must be lifted from local government.必须解除地方政府的行政负担。
• He regarded all these administrative details as beneath his notice.他认为行政管理上的这些琐事都不值一顾。

27 sparse   

adj.稀疏的，稀稀落落的，薄的

参考例句：

• The teacher's house is in the suburb where the houses are sparse.老师的家在郊区，那里稀稀拉拉有几处房子。
• The sparse vegetation will only feed a small population of animals.稀疏的植物只够喂养少量的动物。