Interview with Sun's Tim Bray and Radia Perlman

ReadWriteWeb writes "To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web, Richard MacManus interviewed two senior engineers from Sun Microsystems - Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview discusses the past and future of the Web, including the impact that Sun's servers have had over the years. Also discussed is the reason why Tim and Radia believe that P2P won't be a driving force on the Web going forward. Radia thinks that having central sites where people can register is key to making the Web scalable and more secure."

Why Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Q. Why an interview with Sun's Tim Bray and Radia Perlman to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web?

A. Because Sun put the . in .com of course!

OK! ok, sorry, I'll get my coat.

Re:And I thought...

[mrogers]

There's a difference between decentralising the infrastructure and decentralising the control. Radia Perlman's thesis [vendian.org] is a good example: a robust, decentralised routing protocol made possible by a centralised PKI.

Re:Oh I get it

[dc.wander]

I wouldn't be so condescending about the suggestion... Radia Perlman has accomplished more for modern networking and the internet that you probably will in your lifetime. She is more than just a "sun employee." She is inteventer of the Spanning Tree Protocol amoung other things http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanning_tree_protoco l [wikipedia.org].

Maybe check out her book, Interconnections, on Amazon to get a feel for the type of work she does.

Re:And I thought...

[andrewman327]

The United States protects the freedom of the Internet. If you want to use a computer that is 100% purchased and maintained by the government, they have a right to control access. If I used you computer, you would probably not want me doing certain things on it either. This is very different from a nation like China, where the whole country's access is blocked for many different things.

Most oppression software is not American, but I still disagree with selling to certain actors. At a special event last year in DC, I asked Senator George Allen (R, Va) how he felt about US companies aiding Chinese oppression. He did not know what I was talking about but he said he did not like the sound of it. A few months later congressmen started speaking out against the practice occasionally. News really takes a while to work its way up the chain.

Re:Need a new interviewer

[fm6]

COBOL was not the first high-level programming language, not by a long shot. There were already languages that knew how to interpret formulas (FORTRAN), process complex data structures (LISP) and even primitives forms of block structuring (Algol). The one big idea that COBOL added to the mix was that source code should resemble natural language (IF X EQUALS 3 OR 4 ADD 1 TO X). Hopper had to have been pretty ignorant about the sheer ambiguity of natural language to make this mistake.

Full Interview available now as a podcast

[ReadWriteWeb]

Given some of the comments about wanting more context, I've now done a podcast of the entire interview [readwriteweb.com].