Bebo White, America’s first webmaster, visited Rose-Hulman Wednesday, September 24 through Thursday, September 25 for a series of town-hall style meetings with various groups on campus leading up to his “The Once & Future Web.”
On Thursday September 25, 2008, Rose-Hulman hosted “America’s first webmaster,” Bebo White. Mr. White came to Rose to give a lecture entitled “The Once and Future Web,” a catalogue of the development of the early Internet and the development of the Internet in the coming years. This was the conclusion of a multi-day visit on Mr. White’s part, consisting of a meeting with the Web & Society Interest Group on the evening of Wednesday, September 24, 2008, and speaking at a luncheon in the afternoon of the 28th. Mr. White’s visit was sponsored by the Computer Science & Software Engineering Department, the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, and the Web & Society Interest Group.
The lecture offered by Mr. White, was designed to relate the progress of the Internet up to the point where it is today and help to develop a concept of what the Internet is developing into over the coming years. He points out that support had originally been directed towards various file retrieving structures, often designed to be like the file structuring of a personal computer. This can be compared to the view Mr. White holds of what the future of the Internet will be, one which will more closely resemble the human experience. By this, Mr. White means that the experiences of the Internet will begin to develop into a form similar to that of “Second Life,” a popular online community in which people have characters that interact with others in a virtual reality, creating another life for people to explore in. A big issue that Mr. White feels relates to college campuses across America is the place that the Internet has for the academic community. He feels as though the Web is trying to find its place on its own, developing and responding to outside pressures and adjusting appropriately.
Mr. White is referred to as the “First Webmaster,” even though in his own words “I truly dislike the term ‘Webmaster.’” Mr. White said that he felt that this title was inappropriate because, “It’s impossible for one person to have all the skills to operate a website of any complexity.” Mr. White had originally worked with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and while there had worked on a file transfer program between SLAC and other high energy physics research centers. He then, while on sabbatical at CERN, he came into further research and the eventual development of hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP).