Subj : Re: computers
To   : Malvinas
From : tenser
Date : Fri Jul 19 2024 11:02:04

On 18 Jul 2024 at 07:51p, Malvinas pondered and said...
 
 Ma>  te> Around the time this was all happening, the Internet was undergoing
 Ma>  te> exponential growth.  Bear in mind that the Internet had been done
 Ma>  te> under the aegis of the US Government as a research project, but in
 Ma>  te> 1992-ish the Clinton administration opened the Internet up for
 Ma>  te> commercial development.  
 Ma>
 Ma> Can you cite your souces in this date? Where did you get that '1992-ish'
 Ma> bit of data, and how much -ish would you say accurately that is?

Well, I lived it, so my source is mostly myself.  The
Wikipedia article on commercialization of the Internet
is pretty good; it certainly happened during the Clinton
administration.  Clinton was elected in 1992, took
office in January, of 1993; as mentioned on the wiki,
most of the infrastructure was commercially (not publicly)
owned by then (but I remember big routers at e.g. NASA
AMES around that time).  Netscape Navigator came out in
1994, and NSFNet sold of its assets in 1995, so by that
time it was definitely legal.  Some folks had been doing
business in a legal grey area a few years earlier, though.
(World STD is mentioned on that article).

 Ma> I already knew most of the pieces of data you shared on your post,
 Ma> because I studied computer development and network development history
 Ma> when I graduated Computer Science Teacher. I still get the feeling you
 Ma> wrapped that specific slightly-diffuse bit of data around a lot of
 Ma> all-well-known yabba-dabba... Do you really know there was anything
 Ma> accessible through a DNS by connecting to a TCP/IP service and querying
 Ma> for a regular URL that would get translated to a specific IP and give
 Ma> back a renderable object to whatever you were connecting with from your
 Ma> side?

URLs debuted with the web in 1991.  We were definitely using
them with NCSA Mosaic and Lynx by 1993 (I can remember that
it took approximately all night to compile Mosaic on a Sun
SPARCstation 2 with a, what, 20MHz sun4c processor and 8ish
megs of RAM...).  The CERN site was, of course, already
accessible, and there were a lot of web sites floating around
at that time.  I remember being distinctly unimpressed by the
web; the protocol (HTTP) was garbage, the markup language was
a joke; the software was buggy and not very interactive.  It
really felt like a step backwards.

 Ma> I always knew something like that wasn't possible before 1995, but
 Ma> couldn't back that up with proof. If you can step up with some proof for
 Ma> what you say is what happened, you might change my mind on the matter.
 Ma> Thank you!

I don't know what counts as "proof" in your mind.  My own
personal experience was that all of this was possible well
before 1995.

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