[HN Gopher] The Web's Timeline
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The Web's Timeline
        
       Author : marban
       Score  : 66 points
       Date   : 2022-06-01 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thehistoryoftheweb.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thehistoryoftheweb.com)
        
       | bag_boy wrote:
       | Had no clue IMDb was that old
        
       | fourstar wrote:
       | Props for listing k10k (which CryptoPunks was heavily inspired
       | from). No mention of E/N (Everything/Nothing) sites, though
       | (markside, john's crawlspace, histandard, badassmofo,
       | chilidog.org, etc, etc)
        
         | enobrev wrote:
         | I owe a good deal of my career to the fine folks at Cuban
         | Council. Loved working with all of them.
        
         | marban wrote:
         | For the kids:
         | https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/kaliber10000-2003
        
       | gpspake wrote:
       | I love this sort of thing. Whenever I try to make a case for
       | anything at work, I always try to frame it in a historical
       | context because everything we do in computing exists on a
       | historical timeline that's relatively short and ongoing and we
       | shouldn't necessarily hold anything as a universal truth. It's
       | possible that everything we hold dear (OOP, etc) will be a blip
       | in early computing history in the grand scheme of things. I work
       | in web so one thing I preach a lot is that a lot of the explosion
       | of activity in JS over the past decade or so can largely be
       | traced back to the introduction of the iphone, the subsequent
       | mass adoption of mobile devices, and the sudden expectation for
       | native-app like experiences from the web on low powered devices.
       | Thus, a lot of notions about javascript that persist from pre
       | mobile, pre es6, etc need to be checked. "Javascript framework of
       | the week" cynicisms tend to persist from a brief period of
       | "throwing stuff at the wall" to figure out how to leverage AJAX
       | to achieve SPA. Now the language and its ecosystem has matured
       | tremendously and there are other problems to solve so it's
       | important to constantly renew our perceptions and biases. Here's
       | a js timeline I threw together recently
       | https://time.graphics/editor/649085
        
       | kosasbest wrote:
       | > May 18 2021: Digital Millennium Copyright Act
       | 
       | Wasn't the DMCA enacted a lot earlier? Wikipedia says the
       | following[1]:
       | 
       | > The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United
       | States copyright law
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
        
         | ChrisArchitect wrote:
         | That's just the date when the article on it was posted to the
         | blog. C'mon.
        
         | gmmeyer wrote:
         | yea the webpage is wildly incorrect, wikipedia is right
        
       | Lammy wrote:
       | > To pitch it, he submits a proposal for organizing scientific
       | documents to his employers titled "Information Management, a
       | Proposal."
       | 
       | If this is going to be the opening item then it would be nice to
       | at least have a blurb about predecessor ideas. Tim Berners-Lee's
       | "Information Management: A Proposal" cites Ted Nelson for the
       | concepts behind "Hypertext" and the "docuverse". Nelson was
       | directly inspired by Vannevar Bush and the idea of the Memex as
       | presented in "As We May Think".
       | 
       | Bush had his own influences, of course, like the Statistical
       | Machine, but it's a huge miss to not go back at least this far
       | considering the US Government's role in building the actual
       | ARPANET/Internet. Bush was director of OSRD / S-1 Executive
       | Committee at the time of "As We May Think", so there's a direct
       | link of influence between the eventual World Wide Web concept and
       | that of the network itself.
       | 
       | https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
       | 
       | https://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Executive_Committee
        
       | tannhaeuser wrote:
       | > _[HTML] itself was influenced by similar efforts like SGML, but
       | has since evolved into a lot more._
       | 
       | Time for some pedantry: HTML is/was envisioned as SGML
       | vocabulary, ie. using SGML as markup meta-language to describe
       | the elements, content models, attributes, predefined entities,
       | and other parsing rules for HTML such as tag inferences and
       | attribute shortforms. Or at least TBL tried to.
       | 
       | Also, the basic rich text vocabulary of HTML for paragraphs,
       | spans, headers, etc. is already used in ISO 8879 (SGML) as a
       | commonly used "folklore" markup convention, with only the anchor
       | element (<a>) and a couple others being genuinely new.
       | 
       | And finally, "similar efforts" at the time would be HyTime (also
       | an SGML application) not SGML itself.
        
       | peakminute wrote:
        
       | zwieback wrote:
       | I still consider Word Magazine an early high point of online
       | culture, nothing quite replaced it for me.
        
       | sbf501 wrote:
       | Raise your hand if you're one of the ding-dongs who in 1991
       | thought the internet was only ever going to be good for song
       | lyrics and porn.
       | 
       | /raises hand in shame/
       | 
       | (Note: i'm excluding things like EaasySabre [sic])
        
         | zwieback wrote:
         | I was a dedicated archie and gopher user, thought web was going
         | to be just for grandmas. EaasySabre was awesome, though, I
         | switched from Delphi to CompuServe around then.
         | 
         | Also really liked PointCast, that was a lifesaver when our
         | whole company shared a dial-up modem connection.
        
         | night-rider wrote:
         | Well if you want to get academic about it:
         | https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-...
        
       | upupandup wrote:
       | curious as to why nothing after 2018? are we approaching the end
       | of novelty as established domains act as cartels? It seems that
       | so much new progress is being made in AI/ML.
       | 
       | I wonder what the next "internet" will be. I only started out
       | with Netscape Navigator in 1998. I remember reading HTML for
       | dummies and thinking its so easy to do by hand. Then I discovered
       | geocities and I can drag & drop? Then I stopped paying attention
       | for like a few years until I discovered PHP.
       | 
       | I really miss the aesthetics of late 90s websites
        
         | hbn wrote:
         | > I really miss the aesthetics of late 90s websites
         | 
         | You should check this out:
         | 
         | https://wiby.me
         | 
         | Here's the first page I got on a roll of the "surprise me"
         | button just now:
         | 
         | http://texaschainsawmassacre.net/Music/
        
           | upupandup wrote:
           | omg!!! i loved it, got a big dose of nostalgia
        
         | Swizec wrote:
         | Maybe 4 years just isn't long enough for history to form? Hard
         | to recognize pivotal moments as they are happening.
        
         | tiborsaas wrote:
         | WebAssembly should definitively be on the list.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related:
       | 
       |  _The Web from 1989 to 1994_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27928020 - July 2021 (22
       | comments)
        
       | hyakosm wrote:
       | Where is the Apache (httpd) server?
        
       | jaredcwhite wrote:
       | 1994 was a wild time. I'm pretty sure that's when I first
       | connected to the internet and got my first e-mail address (at
       | cello.gina.calstate.edu!). Using Mosaic and soon Netscape
       | Navigator for the first time was nothing short of mind-blowing.
       | By 1996, I was publishing my own websites, and then in 1997
       | someone paid me to build _them_ a website. 25 years later, I 'm
       | still getting paid to build websites. What a ride!
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-06-01 23:01 UTC)