[HN Gopher] 30 years on from introducing the Web to the World
___________________________________________________________________
30 years on from introducing the Web to the World
Author : telesilla
Score : 216 points
Date : 2021-08-08 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.w3.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.w3.org)
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Yeah congrats to TBL and his baby. Actually, I believe the date
| is slightly off, and it should be August, 6th, according to the
| fist website [1], and in particular [2] linked from there.
|
| But I've got to ask what has W3C done lately? I mean JavaScript
| and CSS is not their fault, but looking at W3C's accomplishments,
| they were busy with XML and WS-* (SOAP), then RDF/Sparql, and
| whatnot most of the time, creating a cottage industry of
| "enterprise" standards but completely loosing relevance on the
| web. Meanwhile, HTML stagnated, and CSS had to become the way
| overcomplicated beast it is today to make up for HTML's
| shortcomings, HTML still mostly being the casual academic
| publishing markup language it always was.
|
| The result is the monopolistic browser landscape we have today
| and web authoring becoming unapproachable for all but an
| entrenched profession of "web developers" when the web was
| primarily a medium for easy self-publishing. Soon, Google
| implanted itself as the middle man, when getting rid of
| publishers and closed networks was the whole point of the web in
| the first place. Meanwhile, W3C continues to take money for
| driving CSS complexity ad absurdum (though they have talented
| people on the CSS WG for sure) and drops requirements for at
| least two interworking implementations for their XML stuff (such
| as XSLT). Basically, W3C is acting like a self-serving, pay-as-
| you org for advertising stuff as "standard". W3C's HTML 5 and SVG
| efforts have effectively stopped about three years ago.
|
| Today, almost nobody is inspired to make websites; even
| developers flock to github and other centralized services for
| their stuff.
|
| As much as I believe TBL acted in good faith, I think W3C as a
| standardization organization failed on all accounts that you
| could reasonably expect from a standardization effort.
|
| [1]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
|
| [2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/History.html
|
| Edit: see also [3] for the proper date
|
| [3]: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6484.txt
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Melancholy. So young but so old. Wandering without direction.
| Waking up. Will there be a spinoff? Something to bring meaning?
| laurent92 wrote:
| The previous Kondratiev cycles were:
|
| - Steam engine (1825)
|
| - Electrical engineering and chemistry (1913)
|
| - Automobile (1950)
|
| - Computers... and even that could be split between the
| database era (1980), the web era (2000), and the AI era
| (2030?).
|
| For each cycle, it starts like wild competition, and ends with
| installed actors. Who would think of being the small guy who
| topples Ford by reinventing automobile today? No-one.
|
| There is no going back: Automobile has no "meaning", just
| usages. All of this just makes society go faster. The only
| meaning in life is participating to the economy, family, and
| raising people from poverty.
| tpmx wrote:
| Computers: scientific computing era (1950), business
| computing era (1960), personal computing era (1980), web era
| (1995), mobile computing era (2005), social networking era
| (2010), ML/AI era (2020)
| laurent92 wrote:
| I'm more impressed that the first smartphone is only 14 years old
| and it has changed so much to our lives:
|
| - First, it developed the usage of superficial socialization
| (lifestyle show-off, body photos, up to lewd behaviors or
| prostitution, depression for a lot of people, massive societal
| dopamine addiction),
|
| - Second, Youtube was the world wild web of all politics and
| militant movements,
|
| - We're in a third phase where most of it is under control, not
| tight but clearly guided, with many people doubting the accuracy
| of both sides. The phase of defiance.
|
| 3 phases (in my opinion) in just a few years, each of them
| responsible for negative societal shifts (from democratized
| prostitution to the invasion of Congress), and also positive ones
| (tech progress, political progress too, to be honest). Who knows
| what's next?
| gremloni wrote:
| I don't believe democratized prostitution is a negative thing.
| If anything countries like the US would have far fewer
| criminals and desperate incels if we just legalized it.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I think smartphones might be a bit older than that. I remember
| using some phones in 2003 that already had a basic internet
| connection (wap), camera, and on which you could check your
| emails. The first versions of a blackberry that could do emails
| was 1999 I think. And PalmPilots in 1997. The iphone was just a
| cooler and more powerful toy.
| ghaff wrote:
| Blackberry and Treo from the early 2000s certainly gave you
| "easy to access" email and some limited browsing. The iPhone
| by the late 2000s though was a very different experience.
| There was definitely a gen 1 of smartphones and then a gen 2
| ushered in by the iPhone.
| cm2187 wrote:
| That's certainly true. But you can say the same of early
| 1990s www. My point is that the idea of having a
| multifunction tool in your pocket that could connect to the
| internet came as early as it was technically possible, long
| before Apple released the iphone.
| mattl wrote:
| Probably predating the web.
|
| I'd be surprised if you couldn't get online with a Poquet
| PC.
| laurent92 wrote:
| The Wap, or even the Blackberry, didn't have an impact on
| society. It just enabled a few more usecases for the owner
| but not for the group - like carrying your work with you. The
| iPhone 2007, and moreso in 2010, was an entire leap forward:
| It enabled dozens of usecases at a time, such as using Maps,
| online dating with photos and geographical distance, writing
| reviews of restaurants... and it triggered efforts in the
| dumbification of UI, which meant it went widespread like
| wildfire, which was the condition sine qua none for social
| media to become relevant. None of that would have been
| possible with the Blackberry, its wrong commercialization
| tactics and its 52 buttons.
| wott wrote:
| Yeah, it's a bit like mobile phone didn't have an impact
| while it was radio phone or during the first years of
| modern-ish mobile networks; it was de facto reserved for
| specific professional use and the happy few. It took 10
| years or more to expand the networks coverage and drop
| prices, and then only it had a very noticeable public
| impact.
| adventured wrote:
| > First, it developed the usage of superficial socialization
| (lifestyle show-off, body photos, up to lewd behaviors or
| prostitution, depression for a lot of people, massive societal
| dopamine addiction),
|
| No, the smartphone did not do that. All it did was amplify some
| of those aspects of human nature, making them even easier to
| project; aspects which were already prevalent across
| essentially all cultures throughout history.
|
| Tabloids, newspapers, magazines, television, radio,
| photography, automobiles, physical mail, audio recording, the
| Internet & PCs, books, scrolls, tribal story telling, and on it
| goes. The smartphone is merely the latest amplifier.
|
| Lifestyle showoff? There has never been a time in which people
| didn't commonly do that. There will never be a time in which
| people don't commonly do that. It's a core, fundamental system
| of human evolution and social structure. It's a competition.
| Humans never stop competing for survival, competing for
| position in the pecking order of society, competing to get the
| best mates, and so on. Very high levels of social
| superficiality did not begin with the smartphone, it has always
| been there.
|
| Body photos? Since the first photographs. Drawing & painting
| eachother before that.
|
| The ancient Romans and Greeks were hyper social, gossiping
| cats. They could be superficial as all hell. The same was true
| of the colonial generations in Europe. So were all people
| throughout all of history and without exception, to the extent
| they weren't busy trying not to die of deprivation.
|
| The smartphone didn't fundamentally change anything. It
| amplified, and in some cases simplified, what we were already
| doing.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| That comparison - the smartphone being 14 and the web being 30
| really illustrates what a total warp jump it has all been.
|
| 15 years from boxy home computers connected to each other, to
| glowing high resolution pocket computer slabs. And then 15
| years from those slabs being something totally new and
| revolutionary, to literally 50%* of all humans having them on
| their person at all times.
|
| The acceleration has definitely come with a _lot_ of
| turbulence. If this acceleration is exponential, then what 's
| next is a whole lot more turbulence.
|
| (Edit:*originally wrote 80% - I thought it would be higher at
| this point!)
| capableweb wrote:
| > to literally 80% of all humans having them on their person
| at all times.
|
| While the number is high, it's not _that_ high (closer to
| 50%), at least from the sources I could find[1]. Where are
| you getting the 80% from?
|
| - [1] - https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-
| in-the-w... - check the references in the bottom for digging
| deeper
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't fact check or anything, point was just that
| they're commonplace, routine, cheap etc. Just a number I
| had in my head for some reason.
| Radim wrote:
| Allow me to offer an opposing anecdote: smartphone means fuck
| all to me. It changed nearly nothing in my life. Most of the
| time I don't even know where my smartphone is (except for car
| navigation).
|
| Do people really consider smartphones "more impressive" /
| impactful than the World Wide Web?
| [deleted]
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| That computers don't seem to be correlated with productivity
| improvements is a thing. And also despite the huge valuations
| of tech companies, their secondary effects on the economy
| appear to become negative quickly.
|
| That's very much unlike for instance GM in the 1950's. Where
| GM had a huge valuation. And spawned secondary businesses
| that themselves had large collective valuations.
| wott wrote:
| > smartphone means fuck all to me. It changed nearly nothing
| in my life.
|
| Sure, that's the same to me, I don't even own one. But that's
| not how the majority feels and acts. And there's been another
| acceleration in the last 2-3 years, where more business and,
| worse, official administrative stuff is pushed on the
| smartphone (as mobile-first).
|
| One fresh anecdote. 2 hours ago, I watched the news, and the
| presenter was explaining how you didn't actually need to have
| you Covid Pass on your mobile: "you can have it on paper, on
| a sheet you know, and then er... you fold it and put it in
| your pocket, er... like we used to do in ancient times."
|
| "Like we used to do in ancient times", she said. And she felt
| the need to explain how to carry a stupid paper... (she was
| that close to tell people how many times they should fold it,
| and how to unfold it.) At home, we were like WTF? For many
| people, doing everything and the rest on the smartphone has
| become not only normal, but the primary way of doing, and the
| only way of doing they know. Other ways are already being
| marginalised.
| Radim wrote:
| I guess you're right. TBH I didn't expect that offering my
| point of view would unleash such storm of downvotes.
|
| Clearly many people consider their phone not only a useful
| device, but a _core part of their identity_. To each his
| own.
| csomar wrote:
| It's sad you reduced smartphones to their negatives. I did
| distance myself from social media but here are things I
| frequently use my smartphone for:
|
| - Long distance calls with Skype. It is possible to do a cheap
| long distance call in a foreign country by just buying some
| data credit. People can still reach you through your Skype
| number. Not possible with a feature phone.
|
| - Browsing the internet while shopping. Sometimes I find a
| product that I'm suspicious of its quality. I just do a quick
| Google search. It's possible to do that with a more advanced
| feature phone but a smartphone usually have more screen estate.
|
| - GPS/Maps. Big one for people living in big cities or while
| traveling.
|
| - Payments, notes, quick photos, recording some calls, emails,
| etc...
|
| There are more to smartphones than social revolutions, though
| I'm sure it played a certain role in shaping the opinion of
| people and transmitting the news.
|
| And smartphones are out of reach for most governments, and only
| an AI powered thing can control it (there is just too many
| users to read all their messages) which won't likely work in
| the short-term/present or will be irrelevant in the future.
|
| With the further democratization of tech, I wouldn't worry much
| about control. The area where government have the most control
| is currency and tariffs (control import/export goods). If they
| failed to curb crypto-currencies, they have little chance with
| texts/news.
| iratewizard wrote:
| I wonder about correlation vs causation. Before the internet
| existed, many people recognized that America was a declining
| empire. Advisors to presidents recommended bad courses of
| action - like aligning ourselves with the rising empire of
| China - which have only accelerated the decline. The internet
| is the reflecting pool that shows us what our age of decadence
| / Weimar republic / kali yuga looks like.
| devchix wrote:
| I was looking for an old video of Tom Brokaw interviewing Gates
| and Schmidt, and found this. For a little laugh and innocent
| nostalgia: _Flashback! The Internet In 1995_
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A
|
| I watched that clip and my inner monologue was all "Oh my sweet
| summer child, what do _you_ know of 'The Internet'? "
| [deleted]
| vr46 wrote:
| Personal observation: heck I'm old.
|
| General observation: this is the most brilliant invention of my
| lifetime, and has realized the information revolution, enabled
| countless humans to teach themselves and each other, and shown us
| a myriad of truths about ourselves.
|
| A++
| echelon wrote:
| The WWW was pretty great at age 10, but took a wrong turn in its
| teen years.
|
| We now do signal amplification of the worst of humanity. The
| giants are walled gardens, and in another 10-15 years the "web"
| will be subsumed by Facebook, and Google's
| "Cromification/AMPlification" (content lives on their servers and
| there is no URL bar.)
|
| We've destroyed much of the quirkiness and novelty.
|
| Now instead of sharing content and news p2p, it flows from
| centralized behemoths that choose for us. RIP personal websites,
| RSS, IRC, and bittorrent. They still exist, just as shells of
| their former lives. Their promise sucked away.
|
| It's not like the rest of tech fared much better. You can't even
| run your own software on half of the devices out there now. Or
| replace their batteries. Or trust them not to spy on you.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > We've destroyed much of the quirkiness and novelty.
|
| Yawn. People say this over and over again. It hasn't been
| destroyed. It's just not at the top of your search results.
|
| Within the last week, HN's front page had a link to this little
| gem:
| http://www.redwoodworld.co.uk/locations.htm
|
| ... a catalog of every (?) redwood tree in the British Isles,
| lovingly maintained and deliciously retro. How can you believe
| that the quirky and novel have been destroyed when sites like
| this (and there are millions more) are still out there?
| echelon wrote:
| While it may not be destroyed, the reward gradients changed.
|
| I'm not imagining a world where technology froze in place,
| rather a different evolutionary path.
|
| The incentive structures today produce a massive amount of
| negative externalities that we're nowhere close to
| addressing.
| codegeek wrote:
| I would focus on the overall positives at least in this thread.
| Yes there are lot of valid criticisms but that is more on the
| companies and not WWW in itself. WWW is Free, Open and you can
| do anything you want with it even today. You mention personal
| websites. No one is stopping you from getting a cheap server
| and setting up your personal website. In fact, I would argue it
| is has become easier to do that with so many cheap and reliable
| options (.e.g DigitalOcean, Vultr etc). I run my personal
| website using WordPress (another great invention) and I am free
| to host it however I want.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| UMW in Fredricksburg, Virginia has a program called "Domain
| of One's Own" where you get set up with a personal site at a
| domain of your choosing, available to every student and
| everyone on staff.
|
| https://umw.domains
| goalieca wrote:
| The technology is just too tempting for totalitarians and
| tyrants of all degrees. It feels like humanity itself is in
| some sort of societal infancy.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| > The WWW was pretty great [...] We now do signal amplification
| of the worst of humanity
|
| Aren't non-Web ("anti-Web"?) platforms the greatest driver of
| this?
|
| You mention IRC and bittorrent. Nothing really Web about those,
| either.
|
| Are you thinking of WWW and The Internet as being
| interchangeable terms?
|
| Isn't this just a generic and vague luddite-doomer rant?
| codegeek wrote:
| "What happens in an Internet Minute in 2020, for example:
|
| - Zoom hosts 208,333 meetings
|
| - There are 404,444 Netflix user streams
|
| - YouTube users upload 500 hours of video
|
| - Consumers spend $1,000,000 online
|
| - 1,388,889 people make video/voice calls"
|
| Mind blowing if you think about it. I really want to focus on the
| positives of WWW in this thread. I, like million others, am
| making a living out of WWW and that itself is so amazing. Thank
| you Tim Berners-Lee and everyone else who made this happen. A
| remarkable Invention for the human kind.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| No pedantic comment complaining, that the internet is older and
| not the same as the WWW? Well, then I am doing it ...
|
| So someone using youtube might be using the www, but is not
| when using the android app for example. Etc. blabla.
|
| And yes, the WWW is awesome, even though the spec is a wild
| chaos.
| akudha wrote:
| These are all eye popping numbers. Somehow the YouTube number
| is scarier than others. With _that_ much content, how is anyone
| supposed to find what they are interested in? No wonder
| YouTube's algorithm is so bad. Even google can't do a good job
| of search and recommendation at YouTube
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I'd be curious to know how many combined page loads there are
| for PornHub (and cousins) per minute. It's just as much a part
| of what the web is today as any of the services listed above.
| input_sh wrote:
| Pornhub is very open about its metrics:
| https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review
| lucasverra wrote:
| I stopped being impressed by "one minute in the Internets" a
| couple of years ago. I mean, internet is at hands distance of
| many people now.
|
| As beer and toilet paper. Let's move to more significant
| metrics like people making a living out of it, value
| transferred or something else :)
| barosl wrote:
| It makes me feel strange to think that all these industries, all
| these jobs, and all these companies didn't exist just 30 years
| ago. Nowadays everyone says the web. It seems very hard to
| predict what technology will be dominant in another 30 years. It
| is fortunate that I will probably still live by then to witness
| the future.
|
| Anyway, congratulations to the web.
| legrande wrote:
| > It seems very hard to predict what technology will be
| dominant in another 30 years
|
| The web seems to have bootstrapped entire industries who rely
| on its infra to operate. This will be the same story in the
| next 20 years. The web is the foundation, the innovation you
| will see, will piggyback on top of it, unless something else
| serves as the underlying basis ( _cough_ blockchain).
| beders wrote:
| And we still can't get complex forms right.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| If you were around at the beginning of the boom and had an AOL,
| Juno, or Prodigy account; eventually gave NetZero a try; watched
| Hackers and even The Net, know what a .nfo file is, marveled at
| Napster; collected Winamp skins; signed up to have DVDs delivered
| to your mailbox; and when Internet, Information super-highway,
| World Wide Web, and cyberspace were used interchangeably, you're
| one of the lucky ones. I love the Internet for all it is now, but
| man do I miss the wonder it instilled in its nascency.
| NmAmDa wrote:
| Imagine that the early purpose was just to allow physicists
| working in big collaboration to work together from different
| places and handle data more easily. Who could guess that any of
| that will happen as a byproduct.
| struct wrote:
| It's great that the web is so durable and long-lived, but I
| wonder about the health of it - it's got so complicated that
| we're down to only three implementations (Firefox, Chromium,
| WebKit), no realistic possibility of a new engine emerging, and
| essentially one implementation defining the standard. I wonder
| where we'll be in another 30 years?
| tpmx wrote:
| This is the greatest crime against the web, IMO.
|
| The growing complexity for the past decade has been driven
| almost entirely by Google. I'm now pretty convinced they did it
| as a part of an explicit strategy.
|
| It's so insidious - on the one hand they are improving the web,
| on the other hand, the complexity they are driving makes the
| web more vulnerable.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| It's always like this until the next new thing. The big guys
| will control everything until something new comes around that
| they don't want to implement. It will be a bit harder because
| you have the Web Browser which is a lot flexible than the old
| AOL Clients. Also WebKit is available publicly for any one to
| fork and create a new service.
|
| When modems were available for residential use, BBSes were the
| gateway and slowly were killed by the big guys (AOL, Compuserve
| and Prodigy) but what these big guys refused to do is work
| together to allow further communications with people outside of
| their networks.
|
| It took kids coming out of college and wanting to keep their
| internet access for email, ftp, talk, usenet, gopher and http.
| They started to partner with universities and offer TCP/IP
| (over PPP) access for $20. Local BBS started to open gateways
| to allow it's users to send/receive SMTP emails. By the time
| the big guys realized they were at a disadvantage, they started
| to offer communications between AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy, At
| first charging their users extra fees, some plans made it like
| SMS and were charging per message. Eventually users where just
| using their clients to get to the internet and that service
| dies. Most of those small internet providers were purchased by
| bigger companies.
|
| What will need to change now to kick the big guys (Verizon,
| Google, Apple, etc...) in the balls again? The tech is so
| regulated that I doubt we will see anything new as far and
| networking. In NYC WiMax was hobbled by the communication
| companies like Verizon TimeWarner and RCN.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| Does anyone know if there is a URL for Tim Berners-Lee's book
| "Weaving the Web", where it is accessible over HTTP? Not even
| talking about gratis open access, just whether or not the Web-of-
| documents vision is actually in practice for TimBL's book itself.
| Also not talking about a link to a storefront that sells it, or a
| promo site, or a faithfully reproduced but non-canonical link to
| a warez'd copy. Specifically asking here whether the book has a
| URL. This seems like a pretty basic OKR for grading progress of
| the Web vision, and yet it seems reasonable to think the answer
| is "no", which is incredibly ironic (but not shocking).
|
| It _was_ surprising just now to find that there is not even a
| preview on Google Books, nor are you allowed to search inside it.
| bmn__ wrote:
| To the exact questions you asked, the answer is mu because of
| <https://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/>.
|
| Correcting for the intention: yes, books are easy to identify!
| <https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-formal/isbn> You also
| want to able to dereference. I edited my DOM copy of your
| comment to add the hyperlink <a href="urn:isbn:9780062515872">
| to the book's name, then clicked it. Firefox prompted me to
| pick a local executable. ISTR Netscape used to handle this a
| bit more gracefully. It is perfectly okay that not every UA
| implements every conceivable scheme, the particularities of the
| failure do not diminish the idea of the Web.
|
| I happen to know archivists and librarians. They use
| specialised information systems that are not part of the Web.
| There does not seem to be an urgent need to uplift the legacy.
|
| IMO the grade is not "no", but "the foundations are there ready
| to be built upon".
| mattl wrote:
| https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/
|
| It's not great
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| That's very obviously not a URL for the book. That's a URL
| for a promo site, i.e., one of the things explicitly listed
| as something not to reply with, since it's not an answer to
| the question being asked.
|
| " _Specifically asking here whether the book has a URL._ "
|
| (Being a promo site, it is a place where we should _expect_
| the URL to be linked to, if it existed, but there is no such
| URL to be found on that page, hence the question...)
| mattl wrote:
| It's the URL printed in the book.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| Do you understand the relationship between questions and
| answers? You're answering a question no one asked. Why
| bother responding at all?
| mattl wrote:
| The book has a URL. You seem to want something else.
|
| Stop being an obtuse prick :)
| 14 wrote:
| To me the internet means an access to information not seen by
| previous generations. I've learned a lot of backyard mechanics
| from my dad. But I have since gone on to achieve a lot more in
| that field by having access to YouTube or other forums where I
| can find detailed instructions on how to fix things. I think
| about hacking my Xbox 360 and jailbreaking my first iPhone when I
| realized the jailbroken phones could video record and stock
| iPhones could not. I met my first wife online. I was there in the
| beginning when pictures would slowly load from the top down
| because speeds were just that slow. The stuff you can do now over
| the internet is beyond imagination from a couple decades ago.
| rvense wrote:
| I clearly remember when I first saw the www, a few years into its
| life, at a meeting in the Mac users group my dad was a part of,
| probably at a university department or similar that had internet
| access.
|
| I thought it was one of the dullest things I'd ever seen anyone
| do with a computer, and I didn't at all understand what was so
| interesting about this Netscape programme. I must have been about
| ten.
|
| I did grow to find it exciting for a few a years, my misspent
| youth on instant messenger and bulletin boards, learning,
| flamewars and a few friendships that last to this days... but as
| I approach 40 and the damn thing has both turned into my full-
| time job, and become corporate shadow of its old self, something
| out of a bad old depressing cyperpunk novel, I do sometimes think
| my initial reaction was closer to the right one.
| prpl wrote:
| I remember one of the first things I wanted to actually see on
| the web was the Orbitz (drink) website (96/97?), although I
| remember seeing yahoo ~two years before in elementary school.
|
| I vaguely remember it actually being orbitz.com.
| flenserboy wrote:
| A guy I went to college with was there for the birth of the web.
| I remember him coming back that Fall, and him showing me, on one
| of our campus NeXTs, this new "World Wide Web" thing. "Cool, I
| guess. It's like Hypercard," I said, "but not as capable -- but
| it _is_ networked...so how is this better than Gopher? What 's
| the use case?" "Just wait," he replied, "you can't build on
| Gopher like you can on this." Times changed quickly.
| _red wrote:
| >our campus NeXTs, this new "World Wide Web" thing
|
| Similar story. My lab had 2 NeXT cubes (the monochrome version)
| and the first time I saw a graphical browser was eye-opening. I
| had only experienced telnet and gopher before that...
|
| I think this was probably '92-93 - like 3 years before Windows
| 95 even existed. This experience is what pushed me headlong
| into the nascent Linux, as the idea of going from NeXT to
| Windows 95 was like moving from a Ferrari to a tricycle. Linux
| was no Ferrari but it was at least a pickup truck....
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I remember the first time someone fired up Mosaic on a Sun
| workstation at work. At first the only pages were alma mater
| pages because no one had an IT department that knew how to set up
| a webserver yet. It didn't really dawn on me until people started
| putting up lyric pages for bands, and the speed at which you
| could access the data via _links_. I had been using FTP (and
| archie and gopher) up to that point, which involved a lot of
| typing and taking notes, and hyperlinks /bookmarks were light-
| years easier. That was the lightbulb for me.
| analog31 wrote:
| Amusing anecdote: The computer that hosted the original WWW is in
| a little museum at CERN, open to the public. When my family saw
| it several years ago, it still had a hand written note taped to
| the side of it, something to the effect of "Please don't turn
| this computer off."
|
| It still amuses me to think that at one point, the entire WWW
| depended on someone remembering to not shut it down.
|
| Edit: See below. Reality is much more accurate than my memory.
| ;-)
| codegeek wrote:
| It said "This machine is a server". Isn't that still true for
| any server ? I mean if you power off a server, it stops
| serving. I guess the what makes that note truly unique is that
| it was THE only server at that time ?
| anyfoo wrote:
| I guess it just means "even though this machine looks like a
| desktop computer (which it very much usually was as a NeXT
| station), it's actually acting as a server, so please don't
| shut it down like you would with a desktop machine".
|
| It by far wasn't the only "server" at that time. The WWW may
| be 30 years old, but the Internet is much older.
| codegeek wrote:
| correct. I mean the only server for WWW ?
| analog31 wrote:
| Yes, I believe it was. One machine had to be the first
| www server.
| mattl wrote:
| https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/104/298158460_5495a9443c.jpg
| Gradient-Ascent wrote:
| > still had a hand written note taped to the side of it,
| something to the effect of "Please don't turn this computer
| off."
|
| You sound like "nobody has cleaned this piece of paper off
| [yet]" or "will be cleaned of soon". But it is the central
| piece of the exhibit, very intentionally. Probably written by
| TBL himself and illustrating a feature of the new invention:
| "The internet is always on"
|
| And I heard of this before, that TBL developed the WWW on a
| (NEXT-) _workstation_ , which also was the first www-server
| with a sticker on it that said "This machine is a server. DO
| NOT POWER DOWN!" (https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thi
| s_Machine_is_a_...)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Mixed emotions.
|
| In many ways, it has been a true marvel, and so much good has
| come from it.
|
| In other ways, it has given us a proctoscope view of the human
| Id.
|
| https://c.tenor.com/97Iru0enngsAAAAM/yay.gif
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > Our vision is for a World Wide Web that is more inclusive, and
| more respectful of its users: a Web that supports truth better
| than falsehood, people more than profits, humanity rather than
| hate.
|
| I support the principles, but I can't give the real
| implementation a passing grade.
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's popular for liberals to say things like "truth better than
| falsehood" but they really mean that they want to be able to
| control what other people read. Only half of what they think is
| true at a given time actually is.
|
| The other half of the equation is that the more well monied get
| their message out better than the unmonied. You can't use
| technology to fix that. Most of the conspiracies we deplore are
| advanced by idiots with money.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > It's popular for liberals to say things like "truth better
| than falsehood" but they really mean that they want to be
| able to control what other people read.
|
| Can you conceive of a world, or even just one person, who
| could say "truth better than falsehood" and actually mean it?
|
| > The other half of the equation is that the more well monied
| get their message out better than the unmonied.
|
| There's a mixed record on this, really. Yes, massive but
| subtle spending can result in deep and wide dispersion of a
| "message". But then there's Rebecca Black and "Friday", too.
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