(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


This thread by Phillip Hallam-Baker (@hallam) is a historical- and business-reality-checking response to the UK Minister for Geekery (@michelledonelan) and well worth a read re: who can foster / claim

2023-03-24 12:44:35+00:00

The Web was created at CERN, it was the work of a multi-national team. The only other Brit on the CERN team was myself and I was an EU fellow, the EU paid my salary.



The only government that took a direct interest in the Web early on was the US Clinton administration.



1/ — Phillip Hallam-Baker | @ hallam (@hallam) March 23, 2023

Unrolled Thread (my emphasis)

The Web was created at CERN, it was the work of a multi-national team. The only other Brit on the CERN team was myself and I was an EU fellow, the EU paid my salary.

The only government that took a direct interest in the Web early on was the US Clinton administration.

One of the main reasons the Web Consortium moved to MIT was the personal support of Al Gore. They didn’t wait for the Web to be a success, they took an interest when we had 100 users, not 100 thousand, 100.

While the Swann brothers certainly made substantial contributions to the light bulb and produced a superior version to Edison, Edison’s real contribution was the electrical distribution system that powers it.

If the UK government wants to encourage innovation, you would do better to stop the stupid criminalization of cryptography bill currently before parliament. It won’t protect anyone but it will lock the UK out of the next network revolution.

In the Mesh Messaging system, every user can run their own interoperable service if they choose. They can also use a non-UK based service provider. So, provisions to allow GCHQ to snoop on everything are going to fail.

Cabinet Office reps were in the room when I presented the architecture in a meeting at the Draper Labs. The original design brief was to support dissidents in authoritarian states like Russia and Iran.

The only thing that has changed is I have running code now.

Oh and BTW. The UK WAS a tech superpower back in 2016, before Brexit. The day after the referendum, UK researchers started having to leave EU research groups and boards.

Science is international, Brexit is narrow minded bigotry.

Of course, the UK will be back on its feet by 2030 but only because a new government has repaired the damage caused by 14 years of Tory chaos.

Originally tweeted by Phillip Hallam-Baker | @hallam (@hallam) on 2023/03/23.
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