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The web is 30 years old today

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Re: The web is 30 years old today

#71

Post by bartread »

samstave wrote: post #63
spacedcowboy wrote: post #51

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 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…

> 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.

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#72

Post by spacedcowboy »

elvis70 wrote: post #67
spacedcowboy wrote: post #51

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…

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.

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...

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#73

Post by roastytoasty »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #70

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 defenc…

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.

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#74

Post by spacedcowboy »

samstave wrote: post #63
spacedcowboy wrote: post #51

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 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…

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 £50 to about £350 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 ...

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#75

Post by ghaff »

bartread wrote: post #71
samstave wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#76

Post by icedchai »

hunter2_ wrote: post #59
rurban wrote: post #56

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 bet…

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?

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.

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#77

Post by icedchai »

ghaff wrote: post #66
IanClarke wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

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.

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#78

Post by Stierlitz »

rurban wrote: post #60
ghaff wrote: post #58

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…

@rurban .. both your replies have been modded down into invisibility :[

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#79

Post by adventured »

diggan wrote: post #17
dannyw wrote: post #10

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.

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…

> 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.

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