Auguste Rodin, French sculptor, birthday 12 November 1840, death 17 November 1917
World Wide Web, formally proposed as a hypertext project, 12 November 1990
Computer Mouse, patented by Douglas Engelbart, awarded 17 November 1970
When most people think of Rodin, most people think “Thinker”. However this is just a small portion of his
amazing artistic career. Reject three
times from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Rodin refused to ignore the
negative aspects of human emotion in his work.
Often his subjects are depicted in great distress in the midst of moral
weakness. Sometimes it is this
overwhelming passion that makes the work so compellingly beautiful. Critics doubted he sculpted the molds for
bronzes instead of casting a live model due to the exquisite realistic
detail. 
It could be argued that the
subject matter of moral dilemma spouted from Rodin’s personal life which was
rife with complicated family obligations and multiple love affairs. Eventually, he would marry the mother of his
only child, Rose Beuret over 50 years after they met. Two weeks later she died and Rodin later that
same year. Rodin willed his entire
studio and casts to the French state with the intention they would continue to reproduce
his work; his final gift to the country that embraced his unconventional
talent.
So you have all this information you want to share with the
world. What do you do? Tim Berners-Lee (TimBL to his friends) knew
exactly what to do. While working at
CERN, TimBL with Robert Cailliau proposed to their bosses to take all the
existing hypertext (digital information) and make it available on demand on the
growing interconnected global computer system—essentially making a
website. It is hard to imagine today
what it was like before you could type a few letters (not even an entire word)
into a search engine and have a wealth of information at your fingertips. The Web and the internet may seem like interchangeable
terms. The difference lies in that the Web (the hypertext documents) is a service that runs on the internet (the interconnected computer system). Both have forever changed society.
How it interacts. How it learns. How it functions.
By June of this year over one third of the
planet’s 7 billion people have had at least one service provided by the
internet and Web. With all technologies
& innovations there is always a learning curve. We are still trying to negotiate what this
new virtual world means to us as individuals and as humans. The internet has saved some businesses and
eliminated others. Small specialized
craftsmen can now make their products available globally without much overhead
while the postal service struggles to compete with email and online bill
pay. To me, it is the greater
opportunity to learn that is the most exciting (and I think this site is testament
to that). Don’t get me wrong; I still
visit my local public library on a weekly basis…but I browse the card catalogue from
my computer at home. 
To navigate the computer and subsequently the Web,
Douglas Engelbart came up with a device to locate the cursor on the
screen. Or what Englebart called it: “X-Y
Position Indicator for a Display System”.
Before the days of touch screen tablets, communicating with our
computers was a complicated process. Few
remember typing “DOS” commands onto a black and green screen. What made Englebart’s invention special was
the rollerball, not the wheel on the top of the mouse but an actual ball located
on the underside of the mouse. The ball transferred
the user’s motion onto an X-Y coordinate system the computer could understand. Think of “Etch-a-Sketch” knobs. Today’s optical mice have eliminated the
rollerball and WiFi has eliminated the namesake wire tale connected to the
computer. Further developments with
touch pads and touch screens may eliminate the device all together. However, this tool was essential to making
computers more accessible to the public and ushered in the Computer Age TimBL
and the WWW started. Today, the Doug
Engelbart Institute continues his vision by addressing complex human problems
in the rapidly advancing world. 
Links:
No comments:
Post a Comment