>> Many of the discussions of the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question - Yes, but how will we ever keep track of such a large project?
That is interesting. The LHC basically triggered the WWW.
Good argument for your next discussion with the annoying "what is all this expensive research even good for" type of people. The LHC gave you Facebook and YP, dude!
That's kindof like asking, "If it weren't for this expensive building project, nobody would have ever invented this new type of hammer". If $X buys you an LHC and the WWW, you could spend less than $X to buy the WWW.
I think experimental physics has plenty of its own utility, though it probably won't become relevant to engineering for decades.
My overall point is that you should account for the value of different components properly.
"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y)" [where Y>X]
Long PR story short: RPC was prevalent, that is how you control(led) your stuff remotely. Like Tim. Today, if you'd ask for a NeXT-like toy, you'd be denied were you an average Eastern. But western equivalent asked for it and got one, and put the gopher link address ptr in the reserved field of the text font properties (where things like bold and italics properties are stored) and voilà. You can also hire a cheap student to actually write the web client to be cross platform (its true virtue/value). Thanks to Nicola Pellow, of whom almost nobody knows about. Would the "web" have just run on NeXT, it would be long extinct, let alone take off.
On linking and hypertext: all post-war era stuff is spin. The real stuff comes from Belgium:
"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper
So if the web was originally intended to be a document/project management system, what would you end up with if you tried to invent an (improved) global system of interconnected computer networks?
Something that never gets built because the project scope is too ambitious and ambiguous...
The World Wide Web was preceded by Project Xanadu [1] which, despite a decade of significant investments from both research institutions and private companies like Autodesk, never reached a stable state where it could be actually used for something by people outside the project's inner circle. The WWW got there just a few years after it started.
Tech people often forget that for many global scale projects, the actual /technical/ problems to solve are only about 5% of the overall project. The political problems (political meaning conflicting interests of different parties involved) are much harder to solve.
Having studied both, I love tech because 1+1=2 always. I find politics much harder because --depending on the way you present a problem-- 1+1 maybe anything between 1 and 3, and sometimes even 20.
That is interesting. The LHC basically triggered the WWW.
Good argument for your next discussion with the annoying "what is all this expensive research even good for" type of people. The LHC gave you Facebook and YP, dude!