The World Wide Web was "born" on 12 March 1989, when British scientist Tim Berners-Lee created a proposal titled "Information Management: A Proposal" while working at the CERN high energy physics lab. It was an idea for sharing among computers that became real with public Web pages in 1991. My tie shows Looney Tunes characters scampering across strings of letters and numbers that resemble Web addresses.
Today (10 November) is the second day of the annual Kentucky Convergence Conference, on technology in higher education in our state. I am presenting a short talk about how I've used the generative artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT in teaching my Beginning Ethics class this semester, so I'm wearing my Looney Tunes tie that's covered with words that look like Web addresses -- and my tie bar is made from a real computer chip. I have attended the Convergence Conference every year since it began (around 2015?) and all of its predecessors going back to 1995. Due to my retirement in January, this is my very last computing conference!
On 30 April 1993, the CERN particle physics lab (in Switzerland) granted full public rights to Tim Berners-Lee for the network protocols (http://, etc.) that he developed. This event can be called "Web Freedom Day" because those protocols became the foundation for the World Wide Web, making that communication channel free to everyone, everywhere. By 1995, the earliest Web browsers named Netscape and Internet Explorer were becoming common on personal computers. My tie shows many strings like Web addresses, as the background for cavorting Looney Tunes characters!
Today's tie honors the 52nd anniversary of the publication of "RFC 1." In 1969 I was a high school sophomore, and like essentially 100% of all humans, I was blissfully unaware of the event in network communications technology that would become the foundation for the global Internet. RFC 1 laid out the protocol (like grammar rules) by which interconnected computers could "talk to each other," over what was then called ARPA Net. The principal author, Steve Crocker of UCLA, used these words to describe RFC 1: "I present here some of the tentative agreements reached and some of the open questions encountered. Very little of what is here is firm, and reactions are expected." The historically-invaluable document itself was first rendered as electronic text twenty-eight years later.
