“It’s really just complete gibberish,” seethed Larry Ellison when asked about the cloud at a financial analysts’ conference in September 2008. “When is this idiocy going to stop?” By March 2009 the Oracle CEO had answered his own question, in a manner of speaking: in an earnings call to investors, Ellison brazenly peddled Oracle’s own forthcoming software as “cloud-computing ready.” Ellison’s capitulation was inevitable. The cloud is ubiquitous, the catchiest online metaphor since Tim Berners-Lee proposed “a way to link and access information of various kinds” at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1990 and dubbed his creation the WorldWideWeb. In fact while many specific definitions of cloud computing have been advanced by companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud’s popularity—Dell even attempted to trademark the term, unsuccessfully—the cloud has most broadly come to stand for the web, a metaphor for a metaphor reminding us of how unfathomable our era’s signal invention has become. When Berners-Lee conceived the web his ideas were anything but cloudy. His inspiration was hypertext, developed by the computer pioneer Ted Nelson in the 1960s as a means of explicitly linking wide-ranging information in a nonhierarchical way. Nelson envisioned a “docuverse” which he described as “a unified environment available to everyone providing access to this whole space.” In 1980 Berners-Lee implemented this idea in a rudimentary way with a program called Enquire, which he used to cross-reference the software in CERN’s Proton Synchrotron control room. Over the following decade, machines such as the Proton Synchrotron threatened to swamp CERN with scientific data. Looking forward to the Large Hadron Collider, physicists began voicing concern about how they’d ever process their experiments, let alone productively share results with colleagues. Berners-Lee reckoned that, given wide enough implementation, hypertext might rescue them. He submitted a proposal in March 1989 for an “information mesh” accessible to the several thousand CERN employees. “Vague, but interesting,” his boss replied. Adequately encouraged, Berners-Lee spent the next year and a half struggling to refine his idea, and also to find a suitable name.
Omnidirectional Robotic Platform for Surveillance of Particle Accelerator Environments with Limited Space Areas
