Gutenberg & The World Wide Web

Ask one hundred or so people the question "Who invented the printing press?" Apart from those people who simply stare at you blankly or those who shove you out of the way in order to get home in time for American Idol, you're most likely to get the answers "Gutenberg," or "John Gutenberg." One or two people might say "Johannes Gutenberg." This answer is more or less correct, though partly false and also partly imprecise.

Printing presses of various kinds existed before the time of Johannes Gutenberg. They were almost certainly invented somewhere in Asia, probably China. The printing presses used in Asia for centuries before the time of Gutenberg were, however, somewhat impractical for various reasons. Those reasons aren't important here, but are an important part of the history of printing. Perhaps I'll revisit that topic in some later writing.

The invention by Johannes Gutenberg of a certain specific kind of movable-type printing press occurred at about the same time as the arrival in Europe of another invention, i.e. paper (also, by the way, invented first in China). The convergence of these two technologies made it possible and practical for the first time in the history of the world to disseminate large amounts of information to large numbers of people.

Because of the new availability of (relatively) inexpensive paper books in Europe, there was an explosion of information which the world had never seen before. The most important development prior to this, in terms of the availability of information, was probably the invention of written language itself. Eventually printed paper books became available all over the world. We are still seeing the after-effects of this change today.

Printed paper books, available at a fairly low cost, made it possible for more than just an elite group of people to attain literacy.

Now, let's examine another kind of invention from a later period in time. In the late 1960s and in the 1970s certain technological innovations occurred; these innovations led to the development of what came to be called "the Internet." The invention of the Internet is a very complex story. We'll let it suffice for now to say that the Internet made it possible for large numbers of computers to be connected together over a vast area.

Still, the Internet was only available to a relatively small number of people. Mostly these people were in universities, the government, and the military. The Internet spread beyond the United States, eventually to the entire world, and became available to the general public a short time later. Nevertheless, computers were still quite expensive, and using them was by no means easy. For those who knew how to use a computer of one kind or another, it was possible to become connected to the Internet.

A short time after that, two inventions made it both possible and interesting for very large numbers of people to be connected to a large (eventually world-wide) network of computers. These two inventions are the graphical user interface (also known as a GUI, pronounced by some people as "gooey"), and the World Wide Web.

The kind of graphical user interface which I'm writing about here consists of windows, icons, menus, and some sort of pointer or pointing device (thus the occasional use of the term "WIMP" interface). This is set in contrast to a previous kind of interface (still in existence and used by many people), which consisted mainly of ordinary text, which many people found and still find rather difficult to use. The first development of a graphical user interface and its first introduction to the general public is also a very complicated story, and I have to leave it aside for now.

The other invention, the World Wide Web, was built to sort of ride on top of the already existing Internet. The work which made the World Wide Web possible was done by many people, and is yet another involved and complex story. A key person involved in the technology of the World Wide Web is a man named Tim Berners-Lee. He also made this technology available to the public for the first time, and so he is often called the "inventor of the World Wide Web." We'll let that go for now, for the usual reasons.

To make an already long story as short as possible, in the mid-1990s the World Wide Web became available to the general public for the first time. Over the few years since then, there has occurred once again an enormous explosion of the availability of information to a very large number of people. We are still in the very early stages of this explosion of information, and nobody really knows where it's taking us.

The analogy I've made between Gutenberg's movable-type printing press and that of the World Wide Web should be quite obvious. Both made it possible for very many people to learn more easily, have access to a great deal more information, and consequently led to the vast dissemination of a wide variety of ideas. Also in both cases, these technological innovations have been used for both good and evil purposes; this seems to be one of the few constant themes in human history.

Note #1: I am by no means the first person to make the comparison between the change brought about by Gutenberg's printing press and the invention of the World Wide Web. I simply wanted to make the connection for those who are reading this and may not have heard it before.

Note #2: I have greatly oversimplified a large number of historical events. I am sorry to have done this, but if I had told the story in anything close to full detail, it would have become the size of an encyclopedia. For those who wish to know more about these events, there are many books available in print about these matters, as well as a great deal of information which is available electronically.

Hans Bricker