They were literally jerks. Franklin's work hasn't escaped them either. He isn't even denying the misappropriation, after all, that is what a physicist does by his definition (take other people's data ...work):
just for the record and to please the prospective downvoting mob, here are my experimental observations consistent with the cern experimental domain in order to warn any non-westerners:
"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]
Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines. What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was quite graphical programming, and not world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around -- certainly not western equivalents.
Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. world-wide. Nobody was astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic. They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given away without charge. WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of.
CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Veltman if you feel to downvote this because of CERN.
Are you a Markov chain? The state of the art has advanced a long way if so. Nevertheless I don't understand the point you're trying to make, except that you seem to doubt that what Tim Berners-Lee (not 'Berner') did was actually innovative.
Important innovation often comes from someone making a trivial-seeming connection between two existant but separate concepts. For better or worse, the person who makes the minor leap often gets the major credit, with little acknowledgement for those who did all the groundwork on the separate bits (but lacked the spark to join them together.) It's the creation of something novel - the linkage - that's innovative. It can be obvious in hindsight; it usually is, in fact, but it takes a certain brain to see the connection in the first place.
The world needs people who can contribute flashes of novelty, just as it needs people willing to toil for years refining, strengthening and otherwise enhancing the foundations that those flashes can dance across. In their lives, people do both all the time to various degrees. A very few, like TBL, start something truly enormous through accident of circumstance.
In 1991, hypertext wasn't new, the internet wasn't new, and network file servers weren't new; but the combination of the three to create a user-navigable web of documents independent of the underlying network was most assuredly new. In such leaps and connections the world advances.
"NARRATOR: Sir John Maddox, later editor of Nature for two decades, shows how Franklin's contribution was obscured by Watson and Crick with a single guarded sentence.
SIR JOHN MADDOX: They say, "We have been stimulated by a general knowledge of her work." But in fact, they had particular knowledge of her work. And I, as an editor, would have smelled a rat at that."
They were literally jerks. Franklin's work hasn't escaped them either. He isn't even denying the misappropriation, after all, that is what a physicist does by his definition (take other people's data ...work):
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1380325
just for the record and to please the prospective downvoting mob, here are my experimental observations consistent with the cern experimental domain in order to warn any non-westerners:
"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]
source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report
ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264
Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines. What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was quite graphical programming, and not world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around -- certainly not western equivalents.
Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. world-wide. Nobody was astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic. They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given away without charge. WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of.
CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Veltman if you feel to downvote this because of CERN.