61–70 of 171 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grab a VPN and that won't be a problem anymore.
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?
I’m not commenting on whether they are a good idea to use, but they are easy.
Before the web we had BBSs and computer friends would meet in person gasp .
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…
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.
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 DECstati…
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....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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.
Before the web we had BBSs and computer friends would meet in person gasp .
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…
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.
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 DECstati…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
"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.
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".