Happy 25th for the Web! (What if Alexander von Humboldt had a blog?)

Happy New Year to all of my readers (except of course Jews, Chinese, and anyone else who has not succumbed to the hegemony of the Gregorian calendar)!

2016 will be the 26th year of the World Wide Web. There were a lot of competing wide-area hypertext system back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but Tim Berners-Lee had the simplest idea and it has come to define “the Internet” for many people (Facebook being the definition for the newest users!).

The microprocessor and network switch folks probably deserve more of the credit for enabling server-mediated collaboration, but we can still celebrate the standards that were successful.

As an example of just how revolutionary this world is, according to The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, the great scientist was nearly bankrupt from the expense of publishing his results.:

[Born into wealth,] Humboldt desperately needed the money from his annual stipend because the cost of his publications had left him, he admitted, ‘ poor as a church mouse’. He had to live on what he earned but he was useless when it came to his finances. ‘The only thing in heaven or earth that M. Humboldt does not understand,’ his English translator had remarked, ‘is business.’

Just imagine if the Web had existed 200 years ago. Humboldt could have put his results out on a free weblog site or pushed them into the old Los Alamos preprint server (now arXiv.org). Perhaps he would have gone insane from trying to format everything in TeX, though…

Readers: If you’re an example of the triumph of hope over experience and therefore still making New Year’s resolutions, please share them in the comments section!