Neal Stephenson Quotes

At one point, CERN was toying with patenting the World Wide Web.

The Internet is a container, not a substance.

The Internet is a telephone system that's gotten uppity.

If someone had protected the HTML language for making Web pages, then we wouldn't have the World Wide Web.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the computer code that led to the creation of the World Wide Web in 1990, he did not try to patent or charge fees for the use of his technology.

Britain helped create the Internet - Tim Berners Lee created the World Wide Web, one of a long line of British scientists who have given us an outsized role in shaping our own digital future.

In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb.

When people talk about Web 2.0, they mean that when the Internet, the World Wide Web, first became popular, it was one way only.

You have to remember the way the internet works, when you communicate with the server, it's very likely not in your country. It's somewhere else in the world.

We covered every major segment of this broadband communications world.

The government invented the Internet.

It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.

When the Internet came along, at first it was just a medium for moving text around - books first, then pictures, finally video. Each time the bandwidth expanded, so did the capabilities of the medium, and each time it happened, the Internet cannibalized preexisting formats. And each time, those formats had to adapt. Or die.

Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that's what's happening now.

The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.

The story of the Web starts in 1980, when Berners-Lee, a young consulting physicist at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, grew frustrated with existing methods for finding and transferring information.

For most of the '90s and the first part of this decade, content providers who wanted to publish online only needed to worry about the graphical web browser.

The next Internet could be in the making somewhere in someone's lab.

We mustn't forget we chose the name 'WWW' before there was even one line of code written. We could do that because the Internet as an infrastructure was already there.

The Internet was developed in large part by U.S. government research funding to develop new communications networks, starting with a network created by the Department of Defense.

One of the things that is not so good is that a decision was made long ago about the size of an IP address - 32 bits. At the time it was a number much larger than anyone could imagine ever having that many computers but it turned out to be to small.

The basic technical protocols that have enabled the Internet to work in such a globally interconnected way are developed and shared openly by a community of engineers.

Google has helped raise the importance of DNS above the network engineering community, which has been really good.

Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.

The Internet has become important on the world's stage.