“Don’t Do That!”

The inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW), Sir Tim Berners-Lee, recently accused the British Conservative party of spreading misinformation during the general election campaign. Sir Tim described the renaming of a Tory Twitter account as a fact checking body as “impersonation”.

During a live TV leaders’ debate the Tory press office account @CCHQ was rebranded “factcheckuk” for the duration of the hour-long debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. The Conservatives have said “no one will have been fooled” by the move but Sir Tim said:

“the renaming was impersonation. Don’t do that. Don’t trust people who do that. “That was really brazen,” he told the BBC. “It was unbelievable they would do that.”

That story conveys, in a nutshell, how all the wonderful developments of information technology over the last two centuries are being reduced to crude methods of self promotion, advertising and aggrandizement.

When I started developing software we built applications that executed completely within the CPU (Central Processing Unit) of a mainframe computer like the one pictured here.

Even the data, processed by the software, was just “files” loaded into the mainframe’s memory. Access to the code and results of the processing was available by means of a terminal or a “print-out” also pictured here.