[HN Gopher] Confirming the exact location of the invention of th...
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Confirming the exact location of the invention of the web (2010)
Author : Tomte
Score : 28 points
Date : 2022-11-04 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (davidgalbraith.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (davidgalbraith.org)
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Unfortunately, this website has an issue with scrolling
| javajosh wrote:
| As an aside, people forget how scifi France was and, to a certain
| extent, still is. Jules Verne was French. Paris is/was "the city
| of lights" because the French were early adopters of electricity.
| Descartes, Lavoisier, Fourier... Even the Maginot line was a
| high-tech approach to national defense, and the French were
| willing to give it a shot. I'm actually surprised that France
| hasn't done much, much more to foster high-tech startups. Imagine
| if they made some reasonable Paris suburb a free economic zone!
| agumonkey wrote:
| A tiny blip of history, state companies did impede some
| evolution, France Telecom wanted to ensure use of their system
| (x25 ? x500 .. I forgot) meanwhile TCP was growing in the US.
| Sometimes large public companies are great, sometimes a bit
| less so.
| soco wrote:
| Nevertheless in 1980 the France Telecom (called PTT at the
| time) brought the highly successful Minitel system to life -
| basically a text mode WWW running over phone lines.
| anton96 wrote:
| I'm not sure what the extend of the delay really is, maybe in
| the 90s it could be felt but since the 2000's, it seems like
| France's internet is always pretty fast and cheap and
| available across the country.
| agumonkey wrote:
| How I see it, network teachers who told this story, said it
| as a missed technological leadership opportunity. They had
| lots of skills but the structure made networking lag just a
| bit too long.
| recuter wrote:
| It was invented on a NeXT computer, squarely in American cyber
| and thought space. Just like freedom fries.
| samcgraw wrote:
| Lovely article. As an aside (and I'll say this until I'm blue in
| the face), it always jars me when a site hijacks default browser
| scrolling functionality.
| mig39 wrote:
| Technically correct. The best kind of correct.
|
| Tim Berners-Lee's office was in a building that was technically
| just inside France, as CERN straddles the border.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| At least it wasn't invented in Basel, then we would be
| wondering if the web was invented in France, Germany, or
| Switzerland.
| maeln wrote:
| It's in many way ironic that the Web was "technically" born in
| France, which was also the home of the Minitel, which probably
| slowed down adoption for the Web/internet access due to how
| popular it was (in France).
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://kottke.org/12/01/the-web-was-invented-
| in-france-not-..., which points to this.
| d--b wrote:
| Sure, I am French, I've visited CERN, so I know a good chunk of
| it is in France. Yet it didn't occur to me that the web was
| invented in France. But to be honest I didn't think it was
| invented in Switzerland either.
|
| CERN is like the ISS to me, it's its own world, not really in a
| country. Most people working there aren't French. Tim Berners Lee
| is not French.
|
| And really who cares?
|
| Now that it's out of the box, you'll hear people say "we"
| invented the web. We already invented the minitel, let's keep it
| at that...
| netsharc wrote:
| I wonder at what point "The Web" was invented. When the first
| "GET / HTTP/0.1" (what version did tbl use?) got a proper
| response? I guess he wrote HTML after being able to fetch text
| streams, is it "The Web" without HTML parsing and links that you
| can navigate to?
| taylodl wrote:
| That's a good question - the term "web" is vague. Are we
| talking about the internet or are we talking about the HTTP
| protocol and HTML markup? Those two technologies have very
| different histories.
| lioeters wrote:
| > the first "GET / HTTP/0.1" (what version did tbl use?)
|
| Apparently it was HTTP/0.9.
|
| > In 1991, the first documented official version of HTTP was
| written as a plain document, less than 700 words long, and this
| version was named HTTP/0.9. [It] supported only GET method.
|
| The Original HTTP as defined in 1991 -
| https://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html
|
| The first "web server" went live in 1990 - and here's the
| source!
|
| TCP/IP based server for HyperText "2 Oct 90 - Written TBL" -
| https://www.w3.org/Daemon/old/V0.1/daemon.c
| geenew wrote:
| Since 'Web' refers to a web of links between pages, I would
| personally side on the combination of HTTP with HTML, but your
| point is well taken.
|
| There's also the choice between whether 'invented' refers to
| the moment when a new technology first becomes usable, or
| whether 'invented' refers to the moment when a new technology
| is first used: was the web invented when a client and server
| were both setup and capable of communicating? or, when a client
| and server were first used to communicate? Only a difference of
| minutes, probably, but potentially significant.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Tim Berners-Lee Confirms The Exact Location Where the Web Was
| Invented: France_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3512069
| - Jan 2012 (27 comments)
|
| _Tim Berners-Lee on the exact location where the web was
| invented_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1497525 - July
| 2010 (1 comment)
| gavin_gee wrote:
| This is the most french headline
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