[HN Gopher] The Web from 1989 to 1994
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       The Web from 1989 to 1994
        
       Author : kamphey
       Score  : 103 points
       Date   : 2021-07-23 07:05 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thehistoryoftheweb.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thehistoryoftheweb.com)
        
       | timrichard wrote:
       | "the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), later renamed to the
       | Uniform Resource Locator (URL)"
       | 
       | Nice resource, but I thought a URL is one form of URI, another
       | being a URN.
        
         | palsecam wrote:
         | It depends on who you ask.
         | 
         | --
         | 
         | According to the W3C, it used to be that:
         | 
         | > a URI was either a URL or a URN.
         | 
         | But now, it's complicated:
         | 
         | > the view became that an individual scheme does not need to be
         | cast into one of a discrete set of URI types such as "URL",
         | "URN" [...]
         | 
         | > Further according to the contemporary view, the term "URL"
         | does not refer to a formal partition of URI space; rather, URL
         | is a useful but informal concept [...]
         | 
         | > Thus as we noted, "http:" is a URI scheme. An http URI is a
         | URL.
         | 
         | All the above citations from https://www.w3.org/TR/uri-
         | clarification/
         | 
         | --
         | 
         | The WHATWG holds a different view:
         | 
         | > Standardize on the term URL. URI and IRI are just confusing.
         | [...] URL also easily wins the search result popularity
         | contest.
         | 
         | From https://url.spec.whatwg.org/
         | 
         | This may be what the author of the article had in mind.
        
           | cryptos wrote:
           | In my (humble) opinion only URL makes much sense in the
           | context of the web, since URI could be almost anything
           | addressing something (in the internet or not).
        
       | Lammy wrote:
       | Needs more CU-SeeMe
        
       | RoastBeats wrote:
       | There's a great podcast called Web Masters that actually
       | interviews a lot of the people mentioned in this.
       | 
       | Off the top of my head, I've heard episodes with the creators of
       | GeoCities, Links From the Underground, and Usenet just to name a
       | few.
       | 
       | https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/web-masters/id15300777...
        
       | Brajeshwar wrote:
       | Wow! Cool. If I remember correctly, Internet services was
       | launched in India on Aug 15, 1995 (Independence Day). While still
       | in college, I waited to "read" about it in magazines (which I had
       | to specifically ask/order the book shop) that comes a month late
       | to my home town.
       | 
       | For the next few years, I learnt and even did HTML page designs
       | by reading from these magazines. The day I landed in a bigger
       | city (Bombay), the first thing I did was visit an Internet cafe
       | and created my Hotmail (I still own it to this day) and a Yahoo
       | account. I felt happy, relaxed and visited the beach (my next
       | biggest priority) in the evening.
       | 
       | I had a mentor-ish kinda "uncle" whom most other people treated
       | as semi-crazy. But he was the one whom I debated endless hours on
       | how and why the Internet without even experiencing it way back in
       | the early 90s. Now, I understand many things he said, the most
       | interesting one being that the Internet will allow anyone to do
       | anything from anywhere and that's gonna change everything.
        
         | selimthegrim wrote:
         | So wait, Pakistan actually had the Internet before India? (The
         | Brain folks in Lahore, etc). Wikipedia says first public
         | availability was 1994.
        
       | jayhoffmann wrote:
       | You can also sign up for my newsletter, where I regularly sound
       | out stories about web history and new additions to the (still
       | growing) timeline! https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/
        
         | cxr wrote:
         | Please consider removing "font-size: 14px" from the CSS rule
         | for the main text of the page.
        
           | cxr wrote:
           | There is also a typo for January 26, 1994: "verison"
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | dalu wrote:
       | If "the web" means the internet then that's a lie. I remember it
       | being available around 1995. And I remember smart, friendly,
       | educated people pre y2k, mostly. I remember searching and finding
       | meaningful facts as opposed to opinions and half truths post y2k.
       | I remember everything being freely available as opposed to the
       | pay2 unculture of today. I remember a colorful internet of
       | individual sites that was fun to browse as opposed of the
       | uniformity and censorship of FacebookTwitterShit.
       | 
       | I remember the internet as a unregulated space the majority
       | didn't know or care about where you could do whatever you want.
       | 
       | True freedom is what this felt like. The world was different too.
       | More understanding of how people are and behave or misbehave.
       | Today's netizens are ignorant assholes for the most part and we
       | are at war with each other. HN for instance doesn't allow you to
       | write more than 2 or 3 comments in a certain time period.
       | Ridiculous. Imagine that in the internet pre y2k.
       | 
       | The internet today is a huge pile of garbage.
        
       | eplanit wrote:
       | Really good timeline presentation. I think that Napster/peer-to-
       | peer circa 1995 deserves to be added.
        
         | tssva wrote:
         | Napster was in 1999.
        
       | CTOSian wrote:
       | Early years was really fun esp the mixing between internet and
       | the BBS (that were way cheaper to use) eg: Internet outdials via
       | BBSs, ftp/web by email (on the BBS again).
       | 
       | Early subscriptions -friggin expensive in comparison to what you
       | are getting now (speed+d/l limits) they were mainly dialups to a
       | (restricted) shell (SunOS most of them).
        
         | zozbot234 wrote:
         | > Early subscriptions -friggin expensive in comparison to what
         | you are getting now (speed+d/l limits) they were mainly dialups
         | to a (restricted) shell (SunOS most of them).
         | 
         | And now we're back to using cloud accounts with 'friggin
         | expensive' egress bandwidth for most of our non-trivial
         | Internet needs. (The underlying cause is of course different -
         | a combination of IPv4 address exhaustion and the increased
         | prevalence of ephemeral mobile connections that are not
         | reachable via a single network address. But it's remarkable
         | nonetheless.)
        
         | ghaff wrote:
         | _Early_ on, e.g. 1980s, the Internet and BBS worlds were pretty
         | siloed. But at some point in the 90s, for a lot of people, the
         | more commercial BBSs became ISPs. Probably until I eventually
         | got broadband around 2000 or so, my ISP was the BBS I
         | subscribed to in Cambridge MA for many years.
        
       | flomo wrote:
       | Bookmarked as a resource.
       | 
       | It would be interesting to catalog info on primordial pre-web
       | internet navigation tech: Gopher, WAIS, etc. Also "the
       | competition", e.g. AOL succumbing to the WWW. Might be fun to
       | have some stuff like Wired Magazine declaring the WWW to be
       | "tired" in 1994 too. It wasn't inevitable.
        
         | ghaff wrote:
         | I have the O'Reilly Whole Internet book from the mid-90s. It
         | has chapters on all the various Internet services and also has
         | a short one on this new-fangled hypertext thing out of CERN
         | called the World Wide Web.
        
       | LightG wrote:
       | Just mentioning ewtoo talkers for the hell of it ... Surfers in
       | particular if anyone is still around.
       | 
       | They had the raw bones of Whatssap down 25 years ago
       | 
       | Was my on-ramp for using the web for social purposes as loads of
       | Uni peeps were on it. It was great.
        
       | delgaudm wrote:
       | I would've expected TUCOWS or Trumpet Windsock to be mentioned. I
       | think those were so instrumental in expanding internet usage and
       | usability to home Windows users.
        
         | Kye wrote:
         | That time Hacker News did a fundraiser for the Trumpet Winsock
         | developer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875
        
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       (page generated 2021-07-24 23:02 UTC)