Subj : Re: computers
To   : Spectre
From : tenser
Date : Sat Jul 20 2024 04:07:51

On 19 Jul 2024 at 06:45p, Spectre pondered and said...
 
 Sp>  Ma> yabba-dabba... Do you really know there was anything accessible
 Sp>  Ma> through a DNS by connecting to a TCP/IP service and querying
 Sp>  Ma> for a regular URL that would get translated to a specific IP and
 Sp>  Ma> give back a renderable object to whatever you were connecting
 Sp> 
 Sp> The internet was a whole different beast back then.  You're confusing
 Sp> Internet with WWW.  Early adopters had things like, Mail and FTP of
 Sp> course, but you also had IRC, MUDS (multi-user dungeon), UUSENET and
 Sp> possibly something like gopher.  All of these things used DNS...  and
 Sp> all were pretty much text based.  It wasn't until WWW popped up in the
 Sp> main conciousness that anything pretty and "renderable" came along.  And
 Sp> that just creaked along at dialup speeds for some time.

I still don't know what all of that mumbo jumbo about DNS
and URLs is suppose to mean.  DNS long predates the web; its
what we used after the hosts.txt file became unwieldy and
hard to keep up-to-date.  URLs came onto the scene when the
web started popping up in the early 90s.

People still seem to be very confused as to what the Internet
actually is; it's just the collection of publicly inter-connected
TCP/IP networks.  _Applications_ of the Internet, like the
web, etc, are all different.

As I said earlier, I found the web pretty unimpressive when I
first saw it; most of the content was boring.  I vividly remember
one web site, linked from the "main" server at CERN, that was
some guy's collection of pictures of beer coasters from random
bars.  It rendered slowly on Mosaic on an RS/6000 machine.  *shrug*

The CGI thing came along pretty quickly; people were writing all
sorts of little protocol gateways and so on in Perl and C, so
that you could get `finger` information through web forms.  I
remember reading an article about that in ;login: in the early
90s and just thinking to myself, "why not just, you know, use
a finger client?"  Within a decade the web had subsumed most of
those services and they'd been retired, for better or worse.

Ah, IRC: as a friend of mine put it, "The CB radio of the Internet."

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