So who did invent the Wibbly Wobbly World?

Before joining Computeach I used to work with a very clever chap called Lawrence O'Connor who always called the World Wide Web the Wibbly Wobbly World. Now that's got no bearing on anything really but everytime I write WWW it makes me think of him.

I'm an avid Radio 4 listener and over the last few days I've heard the trails for some of the "Moments of Genius" that they've been featuring.

Today, as I went in to the kitchen to make a cup of tea because my internet connection had just gone down (probably something to do with the"wrong" type of snow) I just happened to hear Martha Lane Fox giving us her chosen Moment of Genius (if you don't know who Martha Lane Fox is and you want to then you can click here).

She was thanking Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the Internet. You can hear the broadcast at the BBC website...........


..........As I was stirring in the sugar (I know I shouldn't but tea is so dull without it) I was very aware that in the brief minutes that my connection had been down so far, I'd already run through a long list of the things that I wasn't going to be able to do now that I was "cut off from the world"! How was I going to finish the work I'm in the middle of, how would I know if my kids schools were going to be closed tomorrow, how could I order those flowers for the birthday of my friend in the US and the list goes on....

I've experienced this "loss of limb" feeling before - usually when moving house and BT don't quite get the dates right -and it's horrible. So I'd like to add my thanks to Tim Berners-Lee for this now vital contribution to my everyday life. Now, if he could just stop the Phishing and the Viagra ads I'd really think he was a God!

If you're more of a geek and you want to read a version of Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the WWW then you can see it here.

Lucy