Rather Reminds Me of We Habitual Sunday Pew Dwellers Not Fully Grasping the Significance of the Remaining Prophecies Yet to be Fulfilled… Or Even Our Rights & Responsibilities as Christ-Followers…
For Your Consideration: What are the hidden forces at work in our lives, and how can we trace them? What effect do our decisions have on the rest of the world?
In 1980, Tim Berners- Lee was doing a six – month stint as a software engineer at Cern, a European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva. He was just noodling around, trying to come up with a program for organizing his notes.
He had devised a piece of software that, as he put it, “could organize all the random associations one comes across in real life and that brains are suppose to be so good at remembering, but sometimes, we aren’t.”
He called it Enquire, short for Enquire Within upon Everything, based on an encyclopedia from his childhood.
Building on ideas in software design at the time, Tim fashioned a kind of hypertext notebook where words in a document could be linked to other files on his computer, which he could index with a number. (Remember, there was no mouse to click on back then.) When he punched in that number, the software would automatically pull up its related document. It worked splendidly and confidently – and nobody else could use this software. It would only work on Tim’s computer.
Tim wondered, What i I want to add stuff that’s on someone else’s computer? After he obtained permission, he would have to to do the dreary work of adding the new material to the central database. An even better solution, he thought, would be to allow others to open up his document on their computers and allow them to link their stuff to his. He could limit their access to his colleagues at Cern, but why stop there? Why don’t we open it up to scientists everywhere? In Tim’s scheme, there would be no central manager. There would be no central database and absolutely no scaling problems. The thing could grow crazy like a kudzu jungle. It would be open-ended and indefinite.
He later revealed, “One had to be able to jump from software documentation to a list of people, to a phone book, to an organizational chart, or whatever.” He cobbled together a relatively easy to-to-learn coding system he called Hyper Text Markup Language – HTML. Of course, HTML has come to be the language of the Web – it is how Web developers put up most web pages that include formatted text, links, and images.
He designed an addressing scheme that gave each document a unique location, a universal resource locator, or URL. He designed a set of rules that permitted these documents to be linked together on computers connected by phone lines. He called that sets of rules Hyper Text Transfer Protocol -HTTP. By the end of the week, Tim had cobbled together the World Wide Web’s first browser, which allowed users anywhere to view his document on their computer screens.
In 1992, the World Wide Web debuted with a coding system that brought order and clarity to information organization. From that moment on the web and the Internet grew as one – often at exponential rates. Within five years the number of Internet users jumped from 600,000 to 40 million. At one point it was doubling every fifty-three days.
Tim Berners-Lee, trying to organize his notes, literally changed the ways we live. Tim works in a cubby at MIT now, but he has changed the world. He didn’t cash in on his “invention” like a lot of people would have. He’s content to labor quietly in the background, ensuring that all of us can continue well into the next century able to enquire within upon everything.
BOTTOM LINE:
When you stretch yourself, you grow and life’s rewards are attained through this growth. A life of growth will bring you never-ending fulfillment, and mastering The Seven Decisions will help you have that life, paving the way to unlimited possibilities.
FYI:
The Seven Decisions: Understanding the Keys to Personal Success
The Responsible Decision: The buck stops here.
The Guided Decision: I will seek wisdom
The Active Decision: I am a person of action.
The Certain Decision: I have a decided heart.
The Joyful Decision: Today I will choose to be happy.
The Compassionate Decision: I will greet this day with a forgiving spirit.
The Persistent Decision: I will persist without exception.
Conclusion: Final Thoughts On The Seven Decisions. Andy Andrews 2008.