[HN Gopher] The web is 30 years old today
___________________________________________________________________
The web is 30 years old today
Author : Anon84
Score : 513 points
Date : 2020-12-20 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (home.cern)
(TXT) w3m dump (home.cern)
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| The importance of the WWW for me has been research papers and
| books, dev tools, and jazz & classical music.
|
| Although I use it every day, the WWW has become something that I
| actively mistrust. There are too many predators, both commercial
| and espionage.
|
| I scrape WWW pages from the terminal and download archives for
| offline reference. Just to use what TBL conceived, it has been
| necessary to develop multi-layered defence: router, firewall, dns
| doh and filters, VPN, firejail, browser extensions.
|
| I think it's safe to say that this is not what most users have in
| mind when they buy a shiny new computer and "connect to the
| Internet".
| roastytoasty wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I am also saddened that there is some things that I was too
| lazy to download for offline use and is now no longer available
| online.
| OpticalWindows wrote:
| There may be a few sites I don't know about but I wish there
| was a reputable resource that saved archived information. I
| think libraries should archive everything on the internet if
| they haven't already. It would be really neat to give students
| the ability to surf the web of 2001's ecetera.
|
| By archiving the internet I mean everything. Search engine
| performance on each date, ads, social traffic.
| codeulike wrote:
| Is it as young as that? I'm surprised.
|
| One of the earliest web sites I can remember is this one:
|
| "The Really Big Button That Doesn't Do Anything"
|
| http://stefangagne.com/spatulacity/button.htm
|
| I think I was led there via "Yahoo Cool Site Of The Day"
|
| All the comments are still there! I remember laughing at the
| "stereo fell off the bureau" one. A comment I left there in 1994
| is still there.
| barbarbar wrote:
| That site is fast. Even on a mobile connection.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Awww, I'm so disappointed that the guestbook is broken.
| Guestbooks were one of the best features of the early web.
|
| And by "best" I mean "pointless nostalgia," but... :)
| bserge wrote:
| Indeed. I sometimes remember how living was before the
| Internet, before a computer in every house and in every pocket.
|
| Paper maps, incandescent lighbulbs with less lumen output than
| any smartphone, CRT displays, LCD panels as thick as a MacBook
| Air (a modern OLED is as thin as paper!), libraries with actual
| books (that never had enough information), payphones... I'd say
| things got a lot better :D
| ghaff wrote:
| >that never had enough information
|
| One of the things that periodically strikes me as someone who
| was a product manager from the mid-80s through the 90s is how
| hard it was to get information. For example, I remember we
| paid one company a fair bit of money to fax us any data
| sheets they had on specific competitive products when we were
| about to do a product announcement. (Oh, and we paid them for
| each category of computer systems we wanted access to
| information on.) Basically, everyone sent this firm their
| data sheets because we couldn't really ask each other
| directly. That was how one did competitive analysis.
|
| I think if I were to go back in time, I'd quit after a week
| because I would feel I simply didn't have access to the
| information I needed to do my job.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Is it as young as that? I'm surprised.
|
| And, really, 30 years overstates it. You need another 5 years
| before all the pieces came together to make something that
| really looks like the modern web and maybe even a couple more
| before it really started having an effect on even tech-savvy
| audiences.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| When I set up my first website, you had to email CERN to be put
| on a list of websites around the world, that was published on
| their website...
|
| I think it was about the 60th (I forget the exact number, it was
| a long time ago :) website in the UK, serving the "needs" of (ok,
| playing with tech for) the image processing group in Kings
| College London's physics dept while doing my PhD.
|
| The server ran on my desktop DECstation 3100, a 16MHz R2000 with
| a 1024x864 1-bit display named asterix.ph.kcl.ac.uk - Yeah,
| 1-bit. In the image-processing dept... still, it was more than
| 10x faster than the microvax that served the rest of the dept!
|
| It's kind of amazing to me, having lived through all the change,
| that a modern Arm SOC like the $5 Pi-0 would blow away that at-
| the-time (1989) high-end workstation, in every respect. In the
| dust.
|
| In comparison, the first computer I ever got was the ZX81 (in
| 1981, so about 8 years earlier) and it had 1K of RAM, came as
| components that I soldered to the motherboard (I was 11 at the
| time, soldering was old-hat) and I was more interested in the
| black-and-white, dial-tuned, portable TV that I could have in my
| bedroom that came with it :) But to go from that to the DEC 3100
| in such a short time was also massive progress.
| slim wrote:
| that asterix.ph.kcl.ac.uk sounds familiar. did you host an irc
| server ?
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Not at the time, no. All the computers in the office were
| named after asterix characters, but that's probably
| relatively common.
|
| Kinder eggs came out with a bunch of asterix-themed toys
| inside, and there was a frenzy of kinder-egg-eating to get
| your character to sit on top of your workstation.
|
| We eventually got an SGI Indy, and that one was called
| getafix, because it was "magical", in the Jobs sense before
| Steve made it a thing.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Wasn't it named uk.ac.kcl.ph.asterix, or had you Brits finally
| stopped driving on the wrong side of the internet by then? ;)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| That was JANet [1], the fastest network in the world at the
| time, and it grew out of the packet switching research in the
| 60's [2]. A few years later they upgraded to gigabit links
| and called <drum roll please> Super-Janet :)
|
| You could send email to either form address, and there was an
| internet/JANet gateway that figured it out. Everyone decided
| it was easier to use one naming standard though, so we went
| with what we have today.
|
| [1] https://www.jisc.ac.uk/janet/history
|
| [2] https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg24532640-100-how-
| we-ne...
| samstave wrote:
| I love stories of yore like this. I got my first machine in
| ~1985 or so... I convinced my dad he needed a machine for his
| business - and then I just played populous and called long
| distance from Tahoe to a BBS in San Jose to play the pit and
| trade wars.
|
| I got grounded for a month because the long distance phone bill
| was $926 and my dad was furious.
|
| He yelled at me one time and said "stop wasting your time on
| the damn computer - it will never do anything for you!"
|
| Years later - after a successful time working in Silicon Valley
| building out many a thing, my dad came to my house and he
| apologized for yelling at me for "wasting time on the computer"
| - and I was touched that he remembered that time from when I
| was 11 and he said that...
|
| My first machine was a Tandy 1000 - and I was also calling in
| to PC-Link (which later became AOL) to chat with strangers....
| bartread wrote:
| > because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad
| was furious
|
| Blimey. I'm not surprised. In today's money that's $2,239.52.
| You were like a very early forerunner of those kids running
| up massive credit card bills on in-app purchases.
|
| Great story though: thanks for sharing.
| ghaff wrote:
| Long distance calling used to be a pretty big deal. Even
| intrastate calls outside of your local calling area could
| be expensive--in fact, sometimes more than interstate. For
| BBSs, there was various software available that basically
| let you logon, do your uploads and downloads of messages,
| hang up and do your reading and writing offline.
|
| Go back a few years further and people would do all kinds
| of tricks if, for example, they just wanted to signal
| someone that they'd arrived somewhere safely. They'd make
| an operator-assisted person-to-person and the receiving
| caller would just say that person wasn't there and there
| would be no charge.
| specialist wrote:
| Call forwarding was one way to bypass intrastate long
| distant charges. My bestie ran a co-op. Members would get
| dedicated POTS line, add call forwarding feature, run a
| dedicated relay node. He maintained both dialer (client)
| and router (server) software. You enter phone number,
| dialer would pick a toll-free node in that general
| direction (telco provisioned prefixes corresponded to
| physical exchanges). Node would answer, decide to forward
| you to target number or next node. repeat as needed. The
| co-op spanned much of western Washington, from Bellingham
| to Olympia.
| Kye wrote:
| Phreaking as a Service
| giantrobot wrote:
| PhaaS
|
| We can call the setup a PhaaSer. You're welcome world.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Bob Wehadababyitsaboy:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs
| tylerscott wrote:
| I immediately thought of this. Thanks for the link!
| downandout wrote:
| I ran up a $400 bill one month in the early 90's when I
| was in high school using a BBS in San Diego from my
| parents' house in Escondido (roughly 30 miles away).
| Despite being in the same area code at the time, the
| rates were obscene and I believe higher than it would
| have been interstate.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _For BBSs, there was various software available that
| basically let you logon, do your uploads and downloads of
| messages, hang up and do your reading and writing
| offline._
|
| I used to run a node of one of the first public BBS
| networks (1983ish). Messages went from one node to the
| other using store-and-forward overnight. With enough
| nodes in the right LATAs, you could send messages (e-mail
| at first, then bulletin board messages) across the entire
| region.
|
| Where I lived at the time, I could make a local call
| between two area codes in two different states, so my
| node was very busy overnight relaying all the messages
| that got bottled up in either state at 300 baud.
| irrational wrote:
| My city used to be divided up like a pie. Calling from
| one pie slice to another would incur a fee. Near the
| center of the city the slices came together so calling
| someone across the street could incur a fee.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I did a similar thing when I was at college. I'd set up
| 'Empire'[1], a sort of multiplayer civilization server at
| college, and I'd graduated to an Atari ST with a massively-
| fast 2400 baud modem (none of that 300-baud or even 1200-baud
| stuff for me!) which cost me a fair amount of my student
| budget for the term...
|
| Anyway, I bought it 1 month after we'd all collectively
| rented a house, and we'd already had a telephone bill for the
| previous month. I think it went from about PS50 to about
| PS350 for that month, after which I discovered the joys of
| downloading the game state (built into the game) and writing
| scripts to make my moves, then uploading those moves in one
| go, rather than doing everything interactively while online.
|
| Now, I have a 1 Gbit always-on connection :) Tempus Fugit.
|
| [1] I was planning to link to Wolfpack empire here, but I
| just tried and the site is down - I hope it's just temporary
| because I still fondly recollect nuking the hell out of my
| friends countries... www.wolfpackempire.com. Okay, looks like
| it's gone to https://empiredirectory.net/index.php ...
| sokoloff wrote:
| > massively-fast 2400 baud modem (none of that 300-baud or
| even 1200-baud stuff for me!)
|
| My first ever income from programming was writing some
| machine code to run in a USR$ on an Atari 8-bit BBS. Turns
| out the XModem checksum calculation was slow enough that
| when 1200 baud modems came out, there was a noticeable
| delay between chunks for BASIC to calc the checksum. At
| around 20 bytes long, I was paid $20. Man, do I wish I
| could make $1/byte now...
| technofiend wrote:
| I ran a few bulletin boards and definitely remember a few
| high dollar diner's club bills after discovering all my
| favorite high school PLATO games were available on a service
| of some kind. Later at college somehow a MUD ended up on one
| of the Decstation 3100s in the CS lab. That was the glory
| days of everything having an internet-exposed routable IP
| before the Morris worm proved what a bad idea that was.
| katzgrau wrote:
| My dad yelled at me for spending all day on the computer
| learning visual basic. He didn't know the first thing about
| computers but got one because schools were starting strongly
| suggest essays were typed. Wanted me to focus on school work,
| not waste time learning some "nerd shit" as he'd later (half
| jokingly) say.
|
| It didn't help that I didn't have good grades and got in my
| fair of trouble. I stuck with it though, and within a year of
| getting out of college made more than my parents combined.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| My dad used to get a bit frustrated that I wanted to sit on
| the computer rather than tinkering with various engines
| (lawnmower, model plane, etc.) he was working with. One day I
| sat him down and showed him how I debug a bit of code, and
| the lightbulb went off that I was doing a very similar thing
| to what he enjoyed doing with engines.
|
| We understood each other better after that day.
|
| (Of course, now that I own a home, I wish I'd done more of
| the engine tinkering... I learned what a carburetor is and
| how to clean it via FaceTime.)
| Apofis wrote:
| Wow, I didn't realize I'm older than the internet. When I have
| grandkids, I'll tell them stories that start with your first
| paragraph.
| elvis70 wrote:
| My first computer was a ZX81 with 1K of RAM, received as a
| soldering kit. We had the 16K extension, very sensitive and
| which made the system reboot at the slightest shock.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Yep, I remember it well... it's weird that it took _so_ long
| for people to realize that the solution was to decouple the
| two with a short _n_ -way idc cable...
|
| It was the motion of pressing down on the keyboard (or
| otherwise moving it) that caused the two rigid bodies
| (computer and ram pack) to momentarily lose contact, and
| _boom_ - bye bye work...
| neilv wrote:
| The DECstation 3100 was a nice workstation at the time. When I
| arrived at the internship for my first hardcore software
| engineering job, I got our first porting 3100 for my
| workstation. We were a SPARC shop, but my mentor had still
| named the DECstation "screamer", because it was fast. Ultrix
| also had a few neat tools, like "dxdiff" (GUI diff program).
| [deleted]
| samizdis wrote:
| I remember transitioning from Prestel, where in the mid-80s I
| played the MMO Shades [1], to the web and then getting more and
| more despondent as year after year the experience seemed to
| degrade as everyone and their dog went online.
|
| [1]
| https://www.prestel.org.uk/download.php?cat=15_Prestel&file=...
|
| Edit to add: Prestel was an interactive service run by the UK
| Post Office. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel
| qrbLPHiKpiux wrote:
| And what a mess it is compared to then.
| hit8run wrote:
| Ah good times. No adblocker needed and a sophisticated audience
| :D
| neatze wrote:
| Just use ublock and no-script add-ons in your browser.
| danmg wrote:
| Not that much content either at least on the "web".
| papito wrote:
| The Web accelerated _everything_. The speed of picking up
| knowledge and general developments has multiplied by who knows
| how much. The know-how in every single vocation is no longer
| compartmentalized.
|
| A chef comes up with a new trend in an Austin restaurant, a few
| weeks later it's all over L.A.
|
| Thank you for visiting! Please sign my guestbook.
| Kye wrote:
| Part of the reason we got a covid-19 vaccine so fast is because
| researchers posted the genetic sequence of the virus on the web
| for anyone to download.
|
| https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/china-re...
|
| I can't find much more than that because mainstream search
| engines increasingly don't return relevant or useful results.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| And to think Al Gore was only 42 then
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker
| News? We're trying for something different here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| How sad it makes me that this site requires js and new browser to
| view... It would have been so easy to make it compatible in the
| spirit of the web.
| dcwca wrote:
| The spirit of the web isn't frozen in time.
| tobr wrote:
| I can't see anything on the linked page to suggest that the web
| was "born" 30 years ago today (i.e. 20 December 1990). On the
| contrary, it says it was invented in 1989.
|
| Wikipedia[1] lists the official release date of the first web
| browser, WorldWideWeb, as 25 December 1990. Tim Berners-Lee has
| said that the first version was "whimsically dated 901225
| although I was NOT working on Christmas Day -- it was prepared
| some time before closed for Christmas"[2] - so maybe that works
| out to 30 years ago today?
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
|
| 2: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html
| smarx007 wrote:
| CERN celebrated the 30th anniversary on 2019-03-12
| https://home.cern/events/web30, but I do agree that celebrating
| the day the first (public) web server went up is a bit more
| symbolic than the day the proposal was submitted.
| [deleted]
| cpach wrote:
| I found this document
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130605043221/https://timeline....
|
| It says "The world's first website and server go live at CERN"
| on 1990-12-20
| muyuu wrote:
| it's weird that this page is not public anymore
|
| the history page here
| https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-birth-of-the-
| Worl... doesn't list this date - does list the availability
| of the browser in xmas day
| vfc1 wrote:
| The web is just getting started, I don't see it hitting a stable
| point before it its 50 years old or so. More and more
| transactions are made online as opposed to before.
|
| More and more jobs are available online, but it's still a small
| percentage. Imagine when most of everyone's shopping is done
| online, when half the people work remotely, and when all
| countries in the world not just the most developed ones have full
| access to fast internet.
| stevespang wrote:
| And behold the privacy violating, intrusive, malware inhabited,
| monopoly ridden POS it has become. From huge corporations to
| Russian and Chinese hackers - - - the root of all evil is money
| nalekberov wrote:
| The web is very fascinating space for me. Back in university
| years I started to realize how much powerful is web. One doesn't
| have to buy a lot of book in order to learn new things. It's just
| amazing.
|
| And yet I am a bit pessimistic about the future of the web, in
| the beginning we all hoped it will created new space, where we
| will be able to freely speak and share our thoughts, in fact
| today's web turns into a space where surveillance has become a
| standard.
|
| The web was created for people, not for capitalists.
| est wrote:
| I remember decades ago when I first dialed up to the Internet.
| Went for the good knowledge on telnet bbs and usenet, stayed for
| the memes on www.
| macintux wrote:
| All I particularly remember from Usenet: jms interacting with
| Babylon 5 fans, and Serdar Argic's ongoing efforts to invert
| the history of the Armenian genocide.
| CTOSian wrote:
| looks like yesterday I used BBS's to outdial to the web :'-) +++
| ATZ
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Before the web we had BBSs and computer friends would meet in
| person _gasp_.
| IanClarke wrote:
| They are famous and it comes up regularly, but younger people
| won't know about "the Usenet" or Bully Boards (BBS). They were
| awesome for their time: They had awesome, engaging features,
| maybe on a "nerd" level O:-), back then not accessible for
| everyone. Today we have much better ways to interact online,
| kind of with the whole world and somehow everyone is online,
| today. Locality has lost on importance, since ways to interact
| remotely/online became more powerful and also accessible for
| all. It's really interesting where this leads to in the future.
| E.g. WFH (work from home, especially emphasized by "Covid"):
| Companies might outsource development to the lowest COL (cost
| of living) area in that vein. Also: Everyone is globally
| connected, better and better, yet somehow more and more "home
| alone". So interesting, somehow unavoidable and it's open to
| see where this develops and if we manage to make these
| developments positive and get the negatives under control for
| all/most involved.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Yep, the internet is an improvement and it changed the world.
| We are all better off for it.
|
| I suppose the article brought me back to a different time.
| That original all text green-on-black, terminal-like, view
| really took me back to the BBS (Bulletin Board System) days.
| You might not remember but modems were a thing before the
| internet, I can remember my Dad tying up the house phone for
| hours while dialed into the mainframe at the office.
|
| And the early days of the internet probably looked like a
| service like Prodigy for a lot of people. Prodigy was a fancy
| BBS. And everything had to work at dial-up speed. Even
| Berners-Lee's original pages would have been data-conserving
| and fast.
|
| Its interesting that the user experience in those times felt,
| and probably was, faster. Our fancy modern graphics take a
| lot of resources in comparison. While its easy to point to
| numerous benefits to the modern internet, we've slipped in
| terms of time to display info on the screen. Modern web apps
| treat bandwidth and storage as infinite and free resources,
| its really the opposite of what we used to do and maybe not
| for the better.
|
| I suppose that the key difference is that Berners-Lee's WWW
| used the benefit of an always-connected network. Where the
| BBS days were all about temporary network connections. While
| we use WWW and Internet almost interchangeably, its the
| always-connected network - the concept of packet switching
| over circuit switching - that brought the benefit of the WWW.
| I'm sure in 30 more years we'll have things I can't imagine
| today, its the power of the network.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Locality has lost on importance
|
| In the BBS era, locality could still matter because of the
| expense of long distance charges. For quite a long time, a
| core group on a local BBS I subscribed to would actually get
| together and socialize semi-regularly.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yes, we used to do that, too! During the summers we'd have
| "BBS picnics" and also gatherings a local restaurants. That
| is one thing I do miss about the old days... the loss of
| locality.
| BillyTheKing wrote:
| I find it fascinating that the web changed just about every
| industry out there, apart from the one it set out to change -
| academic publishing.. It's still an oligopoly, with the same,
| small number of players acting as gatekeepers
| breck wrote:
| It would be great if a big band of Doctorates got together and
| committed to renouncing their PhDs if copyright (at the very
| least in the scientific domain) is not abolished.
|
| They have the power to do that.
|
| 30 years after the great gift of the web we are still waiting,
| and Alexandra Elbakyan has shown us how amazing it is to have
| all scientific papers be available to everyone.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Why would that make for a reasonable threat to the publishers
| or government? The power the academics have here is much more
| direct, if they are organised enough to make such an action:
| they can simply stop using the journals (indeed many fields
| and subfields do not use such closed-access journals).
| breck wrote:
| Your idea is better than mine.
|
| > indeed many fields and subfields do not use such closed-
| access journals
|
| This would maybe make for a good public ranking--showing a
| list of fields and percentage of open access journals--and
| hopefully academic in closed fields would adapt quickly to
| avoid the embarrassment.
| ConcreteGidget wrote:
| Except I can now pirate.
|
| RIP Aaron Swartz
| gaudat wrote:
| At least we can enjoy Libgen and Sci-Hub's effort to make those
| knowledge available for free to us, the motivated. We owe them
| a big thanks.
| samoa42 wrote:
| while i too apreciate those services, it's not like they
| invented publication of pirated content.
| specialist wrote:
| Recurring paradox: how military command & control communication
| technology also fosters spontaneous collaboration. An
| interesting tension.
| bsenftner wrote:
| So, in a perverse view, the web is civilization's largest, most
| epic failure: it altered our entire civilization, yet left the
| one aspect it was intended to change alone.
| sien wrote:
| What about arxiv.org ?
| rurban wrote:
| I doubt that this was the first website and webserver. Just the
| first HTTP server.
|
| Previously GOPHER did exist, also with multimedia extensions to
| view videos and images, and other/better types of webservers, eg.
| Microcosm, Memex, Xandru, Dexter or esp. Hyper-G via the HTP
| protocol (Hyper Text Protocol) or just via emacs. Hyper-G servers
| had link consistency and clients had embedded search. But worse
| and free was better, Hyper-G and Microcosm were proprietary.
|
| First Hyper-G installation around 1989
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220349551_The_Hyper...
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282504095_Analysis_...
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486838.
| ghaff wrote:
| By definition, the "web" is HTTP. Of course there were files
| hosted on servers prior to the WWW. Including direct
| predecessors such as, as you mention, Gopher. But they weren't
| the web.
| rurban wrote:
| Nope, you mix that up with WWW.
|
| I browsed the web before CERN published their HTTP server and
| clients. E.g. the newsgroups were called Internet long
| before. The Web was the abbrevation of Internet.
|
| WWW was the multimedia enriched variant of the web, with a
| XML format and a state-less server. State-less on purpose, in
| constrast to the existing stateful servers those days, with
| proper login and the server keeping each clients state. This
| didn't scale, so the worse and simplier WWW technology
| succeeded. Cookies had to be invented to catch up.
| ratww wrote:
| Not really, Web has always been the third W on WWW, aka
| "World Wide Web".
|
| The term "WorldWideWeb" was coined by Robert Cailliau, a
| colleague of Tim Berners-Lee in CERN.
|
| I've never seen your definition being used before, even by
| Gopher or Usenet enthusiasts.
| ghaff wrote:
| I actually just looked at my 1992 copy of The Whole
| Internet from O'Reilly. The World Wide Web (WWW) is very
| specifically used to refer to the CERN project and not
| Gopher et al.
|
| "The World-Wide Web, or WWW, is the newest information
| service to arrive on the Internet."
|
| That the web is conflated with the internet in many minds
| doesn't mean they actually are the same thing.
| Stierlitz wrote:
| @rurban .. both your replies have been modded down into
| invisibility :[
| hunter2_ wrote:
| I've always equated "web" with HTTP, but is it correct to
| define it more broadly, inclusive of things like GOPHER?
| Basically anything with hypertext?
| icedchai wrote:
| No, he's confused. I was an early Internet user (starting in
| 1990) and nobody referred to it as the "web" before HTTP and
| the first _web browser_ were available.
|
| Gopher was probably dominant until 1993 or so when the first
| versions of Mosaic were available. I remember installing a
| version, probably in early 1994, on my Amiga and configuring
| SLIP to a local ISP at 9600 baud. It was truly amazing at the
| time.
| known wrote:
| Humanity is indebted to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
| gaudat wrote:
| And now the web is not world-wide anymore thanks to big-tech
| making censored, cookie-cutter walled gardens to the general
| public.
|
| I forgot the last time I typed 'www.' in an URL.
|
| Every friend of mine have their own blog or personal website when
| I started out on the web around a decade ago. This spirit has
| largely vanished with the domination of Facebook and other social
| networks. What we got is remnants of the old web in "old-looking"
| websites now. Like here.
| ghaff wrote:
| Your friends were a tiny slice of the public. I do get the
| concerns about walled gardens. But very few people had their
| own blogs or websites. And many of those who did still have
| them.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I remember when someone walked into my office about 27 years ago
| (in 1993) and showed me NCSA Mosaic on SunOS. I was mesmerized.
|
| And my productivity hasn't been the same since.
| jabo wrote:
| Interesting that ffmpeg was started on the 10th anniversary of
| the web: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25487711
| joelbluminator wrote:
| Anyone remembers "the web is dead" articles by Wired from a few
| years ago?
| froh wrote:
| Would it make sense to use this link? Which references December
| 1990 as the first web http server and http client browser/ editor
| life in cern?
|
| https://timeline.web.cern.ch/worlds-first-browsereditor-webs...
| nabla9 wrote:
| My first web experience was remote telnet connection into just
| that workstation in CERN.
|
| It was common to allow anonymous telnet logins back then. The
| protocol was to use the username "anonymous" as a login name and
| maybe your email address as a password as a courtesy.
|
| I experimented a little. My impression was that it was very much
| like a gopher but not as organized and has less content. So I
| logged out and forgot about it. Then game Mosaic.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Thanks Tim
|
| https://youtu.be/UMNFehJIi0E
| ArtWomb wrote:
| For a glimpse of what discussions looked like at the dawn of the
| public web ("slow, mostly local connections; a growing
| accumulation of posts; the absence of surveillance and metrics"),
| Rhizome has just released a painstaking "emulation" of The Thing
| BBS net art discussion forum. How ironic that the "last avant
| garde of the 20th century" should now be enshrined forever by an
| NEH Digital Humanities grant when it was considered too outre for
| even modern art museums!
|
| "Did We Dream Enough?" THE THING BBS as an Experiment in Social-
| Cyber Sculpture
|
| And with projects like Ruffle, the Rust Flash Player emulator, we
| can imagine a continuous re-examination of the web's early
| aesthetics
|
| RIP Adobe Flash: Five Takeaways About the Plug-in's Legacy in Net
| Art
|
| https://hyperallergic.com/609682/rip-adobe-flash-five-takeaw...
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Link: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/dec/16/did-we-dream-
| enoug...
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Obligatory TimBL (as he was 30 years ago) and V. Cerf pic:
| https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-656d4d361de6a7fc4104cc...
| [deleted]
| dannyw wrote:
| I still find the web to be so beautiful.
|
| I can talk and meet people all around the world.
|
| I can stream hundreds of videos around every conceivable topic,
| in 4K60 resolution, on-demand.
|
| I can make a livelihood without ever stepping feet out of my
| home; and conversely, work from almost anywhere that'll give me a
| visa.
|
| The digitized information of our civilization is just one search
| away.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| The web != all things transferred over TCP/IP.
|
| Talk and meet? Skype, Zoom don't run on "the web" as such; need
| dedicated apps even if those may be based on Electron.
|
| Video (Youtube) only has left Flash-based playback behind like
| 3 or 4 years ago; the resulting DRM required for video playback
| hasn't made purist happy, and resulted in a bitter controversy
| over TBL accepting interfaces to proprietary DRM into
| (proprietary) browsers.
|
| Digitized information of our civilization being one search away
| hasn't been my experience at all in the last five years or so,
| with ads and ad-heavy sites being shoved onto you all the time.
| Even if it were, there's no strategy going forward to preserve
| that wealth for generations to come in times of monopolization.
|
| As the first ever website demonstrates, the web originally was
| a means for easy self-publishing of digital text. Today, with
| platforms, verticals, network effects, the privacy minefield
| the web has become, and the complexity of the browsers left
| standing to support modern experiences as expected by
| consumers, it's questionable if that has actually been
| achieved.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| The web of today is a siloed fragmentary space, a media
| outlet and an amplifier of mass culture. For a minority of
| people it still is the "repository of knowledge" that was
| originally envisioned, but for the majority it is a
| continuation of their lowly existence in digital form.
|
| The spirit of the early web was around building hierarchical
| multi-level directories of stuff, around search and
| categorization. The Web 2.0 ideology changed all that to
| transform it into a user-centric "social" experience that
| required you to use an online identity, build your own
| profile and be passively bombarded with stuff on your
| personalized feed.
| bamboleo wrote:
| Why "3 or 4 years ago"? HTML5 video has been around since at
| least 2007 and has been virtually unchanged since (except new
| formats and DRM)
| devxpy wrote:
| Zoom also runs on the web browser last I checked. It's a
| hidden feature, but you can join meetings without the native
| app.
| Drdrdrq wrote:
| What do you mean, hidden? It's just a link.
| dasil003 wrote:
| There's certainly a lot more noise than ever before, but
| self-publishing to the web has never been easier. Yes, we
| must remain vigilant against real threats to the open web
| (social media silos, Chrome dominance & AMP, etc), but
| thinking back to when I was a kid where you basically had to
| go to the library to get any information at all, on balance
| we are far better off now. The fact that commercialism and
| greed has corrupted the original high-minded ideals and
| innocence of the early adopters is nothing new--that is true
| of every great idea through the history of civilization.
| diggan wrote:
| I agree with you overall, but the internet never been more
| geofenced than what we see today. Tons of content is no longer
| available to me as I live in the EU and apparently american
| companies care so much about my privacy that I can no longer
| access their websites. Growing up in the 90s, I remember a
| internet that was without geographical limitations and people
| doing things for love of that thing, not the perversion we see
| today...
| adventured wrote:
| > the internet never been more geofenced than what we see
| today.
|
| That's because it's increasingly mirroring the real world
| when it comes to nationalism, regulations, barriers to
| access, censorship, culture. That outcome was always
| inevitable, nothing could prevent it. Nations were never
| going to allow an unencumbered Internet or Web to remain in
| their territory.
|
| If you think the Internet is geofenced now, just wait until
| you see what it looks like in another ten years. It's going
| to get dramatically worse. It'll be almost unrecognizable
| compared to the Internet of 2010. We're only maybe 1/3 the
| way to our fully balkanized destination.
|
| There is also no going back. Governments now understand the
| technology and will increasingly tightly regulate it
| accordingly, no matter what it looks like or what it's
| called. They no longer view it as a separate entity, they
| view it as falling under the same exact regulatory domain as
| everything else in the physical space that they claim
| dominion over.
|
| If you have any business or development dreams you want to
| pursue on the Internet, do it as soon as possible, do not
| wait. The Internet and Web will only suck more in the future.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I does indeed seem inevitable. That's why I'm surprised
| that some still believe cryptocurrencies are going to
| escape that fate somehow, even though money is even more
| critical for governments to control than information.
|
| But in terms of suckiness I think that it's not primarily
| caused by regulation (although the cookie law does try very
| hard to inflict maximum pain for zero gain). The funding
| model is just broken and I don't really see a way to fix it
| without losing even more freedom and privcy.
| bserge wrote:
| It looks to me like it will get worse... I hope not.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, the EU has passed regulations and if I'm a business and
| don't make money from you and it takes money/effort to even
| verify whether I'm compliant with those regulations (or if I
| simply consider them a risk), nothing personal, but I'm going
| to geoblock you.
|
| That's not a comment on whether the regulations are good or
| bad. It's just that, as a business, if you're not a
| profitable customer or potential customer, I don't want to
| interact with you if you create any risk/cost for me.
| diggan wrote:
| Yeah, that makes sense. My point is just that, the web is
| all business now, and people use that to justify their
| decisions. It didn't use to be that way, but because of the
| commercialisation of the internet, we're now here, which
| means tons of people no longer has access to information
| they would if the web was still focusing on being open.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not _all_ business although commercial activity, or
| would-be commercial activity, certainly dominates. But a
| lot of that commercial activity, e.g. most newspapers,
| simply wasn 't online at all at first. And the pioneers
| in that space found that they had to find ways of
| monetizing if they were to remain in business. (Which
| most of them weren't really able to do so they went out
| of business or radically downsized.) I'd argue that,
| overall, people have access to way more information than
| they did 10-20 years ago even if some of that information
| is paywalled, geoblocked, or in some other form of walled
| garden.
|
| The Internet (including the Web) of the mid to late-ish
| 90s may have been refreshingly non-commercial and open
| relative to today but it was also much smaller.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Exactly. People seem to forget that the web is just a way
| to instantly communicate with other humans, most of whom
| don't follow the same exact vision for how things should be
| ran and monetized. Widespread commerce and monetization of
| previously 100% open (or previously non-existent)
| information was only a matter of time once monster-in-the-
| middle attacks were solved with SSL.
| benbristow wrote:
| Grab a VPN and that won't be a problem anymore.
| diggan wrote:
| Sure, that does solve the problem for me as an individual
| but what about the rest of the people who don't understand
| proxies and wouldn't even be able to install one with the
| instructions?
| papito wrote:
| Express VPN is fool-proof. The most advanced thing you
| can do is flash your router with their firmware in order
| to do house-wide VPN switch for all devices.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Third party vpns like nord or express vpn or whatever are
| trivial to install.
|
| I'm not commenting on whether they are a good idea to
| use, but they are easy.
| bserge wrote:
| It's truly one of the greatest achievements of this century...
| possibly ever.
|
| I really hope TPTB don't mess it up, it seems they're always
| trying to.
|
| Not enough people appreciate it, just like they don't
| appreciate the computing power and amount of knowledge in their
| pockets. I see people on buses, on the streets, in cafes, just
| endlessly scrolling down in Facebook or something, seeing
| random people's videos and images... Seems like such a waste
| imo.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| It was last century, wasn't it?
| bserge wrote:
| Yeah, but it was kind of very late, and it only _really_
| picked up this century, so I decided to go with that heh
| verylittlemeat wrote:
| I think people underestimate how much of the spirit of the old
| internet still exists.
|
| For example, many twitch channels have an active offline chat
| that isn't advertised or even sanctioned by the actual
| streamer. I lurk/idle in the offline chat for a streamer who
| gets maybe 200-300 viewers per stream and there are now about a
| dozen of us from all over the world who have become friends
| over a decade. At this point many of us have met in real life
| or sent each other packages.
|
| When I was younger I was very active on a small independent irc
| server and it was almost an identical experience.
| sneak wrote:
| > _I can stream hundreds of videos around every conceivable
| topic, in 4K60 resolution, on-demand._
|
| There are tons of entirely legal topics for which this
| statement is simply not true. Censorship is rampant on the
| modern web.
|
| Of course, one is free to self-host, but there are special
| bandwidth deals for the 4K60 platforms that allow them to
| stream to millions of users, something you won't be permitted
| to do from the internet connection you have presently.
| neatze wrote:
| Leaning through is why I really love web, there nothing you
| can't learn on internet, faster then it was ever possible,
| arguably.
| gniv wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of this video of David Bowie from
| 1999:
| https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1339427341387313155
| andrepd wrote:
| The excerpt above it, from "The sovereign individual", is
| pretty depressing. A brand of techno-optimism that we now see
| has completely fell flat.
| specialist wrote:
| Graeber's Utopia of Rules has a terrific post-mortem, eg
| why we don't have jet packs. Not the whole answer, but
| still thought provoking.
| breck wrote:
| Right? It's __still __so amazing. I would say more amazing than
| ever (thanks to new trailblazers like Alexandra Elbakyan).
|
| I was just a kid growing up far removed from the information
| and happenings of the rest of the world and the web was this
| magical new thing that connected me to it. It was a bit of a
| firehose at first (well, I guess still is), but I loved it.
|
| The only difference between now and then is that now I know how
| it all works. Back then the technology was completely magic.
| It's still just as magical in the human sense, and I am so
| grateful to TBL and CERN for making it happen and giving it the
| public! It has been so game changing for me and I grew up in
| the USA, I have to imagine it would be even more game changing
| to people curious about the world who grew up in more remote
| places.
| tylerjwilk00 wrote:
| Ditto. Grew up in the middle of nowhere. The Web gave me
| access to libraries of information and the work of great
| minds. It sparked my interest in computers and put me on the
| career I'm still on to this day. Through other Internet
| technologies (IRC,IM) I was able meet and interact with other
| like minded individuals. It's still fascinating but some of
| the original magic does seem lost but perhaps it's just
| nostalgia.
| ericzawo wrote:
| We're going to be remembered as the last generation before the
| internet.
| mhh__ wrote:
| We?
|
| I think roughly around my year of birth (2001 - if that makes
| anyone feel old) is one of the last to grow up with "proper"
| computers rather than just iPads and phones.
| bserge wrote:
| On that note, it's always funny how kids try to use old
| hardware like a touchscreen
| throwaway201103 wrote:
| In the mid 1980s my local public library had an electronic
| card catalog with a touch screen interface. It was quite
| granular of course, being an 80x25 character green CRT
| display, but it was a touch screen.
| freehunter wrote:
| Heck I'm in my 30s and I do that sometimes. I just set up a
| new Mac after using an iPad Pro for a few months and the
| number of times I touched the screen is embarrassing.
| tilt_error wrote:
| Say no more :) https://youtu.be/hShY6xZWVGE
| bserge wrote:
| Ha, voice control was all the rage for a while... before
| everyone realized it's just impractical
| jakeva wrote:
| Maybe you forgot about Siri, Ok Google, Cortana, Alexa?
| tdeck wrote:
| The web was designed for progressive loading, so why does every
| page on CERN's website seem to have a custom interstitial loading
| indicator? This is one of those trends that should never have
| happened.
| bsenftner wrote:
| The web became popular to mainstream culture a few years later.
| Although I'd been using arpnet for over a decade due to
| university access, I first encountered a "web browser" while
| working at Electronic Arts on the yet to be released 3D0 in '93
| -'94.
|
| However, nobody cared diddly squat about "the web", it was empty
| or nonsense like usenet forums. We only cared about was
| DOWNLOADING DOOM! Id software released Doom, it it was available
| as an "web download link". That was the initial reason everyone
| at E.A. got exposure to the web, to download Doom.
| ghaff wrote:
| I have a 1992 edition of O'Reilly's The Whole Internet. The WWW
| merits a very short chapter in the vein of there's this new
| fangled thing that came out of CERN. (But, really, let's talk
| about Gopher.)
| freehunter wrote:
| My dad co-owned a small company in the early 90s and they just
| got new computers but he convinced the rest of the owners that
| they needed to invest in serial network equipment "to share
| files". In reality they ended up playing multiplayer Doom with
| it.
| conductr wrote:
| It's kind of like where Bitcoin is at (mid-90s web). Most of
| general public has heard of it by now, of those using most just
| came because "get rich quick", and meanwhile nobody really
| knows if it's even useful.
| sollewitt wrote:
| By the time the web was as old as bitcoin is now, we were
| already the other side of the dot com boom/bust and Amazon
| had a market cap of $2.25B. The web changed everything very
| quickly.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-12-20 23:00 UTC)