It's impossible to imagine the world today without the World Wide Web, which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary last year.
And it’s all because of model railroading.
OK—maybe not all because of model railroading. But
the hobby played a significant role in the life and technological development of Tim Berners-Lee, considered the
creator and founder of the Web.
In interviews, Berners-Lee shared that as a boy he
had a model railway in his bedroom.
“It was a long thin layout with a 4-track station in
the middle, and on each side pairs of tracks going off into tunnels to actually
loop back to each other,” he said, adding that he was also an active
train-spotter (what the British call a railfan).
To help with operations on the layout, he “made some
electronic gadgets to control the trains.”
This included making a making a whistle for his
locomotives.
“To control a model train it’s useful to make
whistles,” he said.
“We would make a ace table multiplier for each of the
back-to-back-to-back couple flip-flop, which made two transistors which will make a whistle—a ‘wee’ noise—and you might
want to have the whistle run for a certain period of time, which is another way
of coupling two transistors back to back so that one is stable.”
As a result of making gadgets for his model railway,
“I ended up getting more interested in electronics than trains.”
He went on to build his own computer out of an old
TV, study physics at Oxford and then, while at CERN in 1989, laid out his vision for what would become the World Wide Web.
As Stephanie Lynn put it on her blog, “the boy who tinkered with
circuits for his model trains became the man who invented the single most
valuable creation of our time.”
And to think it was all because of a young boy’s
interest in model railroading.
Sources:
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