The web is 30 years old today

You could announce your new website on USENET! There was a newsgroup just for that.

I don't want to give you the wrong idea here - my bad phrasing above. As an 11-year-old boy, who'd never seen a computer before, I was more interested in the TV... I've often thought what my life would be like if my parents hadn't bought me a computer back then. It's had that much impact on my life...

[aside: story of how my parents got tired of me just using the TV]

About 3 months after xmas, I still hadn't soldered everything together. My parents laid down the law, so I eventually went into the garage and started soldering away. I took my telly with me :) Once it was all together (which wasn't really that hard) I had it plugged in and working, and I was going through the instructions to make sure it was done correctly... Then I proudly walked into the house and everyone gathered around the living room TV (the only other one in the house...) I plugged it all together and up came the boot screen.

Following the instructions, I typed in

PRINT 1 + 1 = 2 [return]

... and the computer printed '1'

At which point my father turned to me, and said "I knew something was up. You've buggered it", and walked out the room. It took a long time to get across the concept of logical true as 1 and logical false as 0...

[/aside]

Once that episode was done, though, computers took over my life, I graduated to the Atari XL (which Dixons sold for £129 with a disk drive) a few years later - it was supposed to be a shared computer between myself and my brother for another xmas present, but basically he never got a look in. I became the 'computer room prefect' at school when I got to the sixth form, I was obsessed.

When I went to college, I used my student grant to finance an Atari ST, and I'm convinced that my lab grades were better because of the beautiful DTP reports I came up with, when everyone else was on 80-character daisywheel printed text.

I used to regularly write code in GFA Basic, and then graduated to C, learnt unix and used my ST as a terminal, then wrote the MDK (a unix-like distribution like Slackware for the ST)[1]. I fell in love with unix at college and have never used anything else since. When linux came on a boot disk and a root disk (yes, floppies), that was when I started using it :)

Time passes, and until very recently I was in R&D at Apple. Everything from verilog for FPGA's, kernel drivers, PCIe bus drivers, system frameworks, app frameworks, and even full-blown applications. One project I worked on, I had to produce an operating system for something that didn't have a central CPU. That took me two years, but it was a lot of fun, and I believe will have enormous impact when it finally sees the light of day :)

I've been immensely fortunate in that computers (my hobby for the last 40 years or so, my degree was in Physics, but generally physicists consider themselves jacks of all trades. Pretty much everything deals with energy at some point...) are also my day job. Sometimes it's had its down-sides, but mainly it's been a blast :)

[1]: http://umich.edu/~archive/atari/Mint/Distrib_kit/Doc/readme....

"this has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS.." If you can spare three and a half minutes (start time set to the relevant point) to watch the video [1]from 1997 below...

https://youtu.be/aYT2se94eU0?t=1279

...then you might enjoy the different point of view as discussed here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lfyou/alan_ka...

It comes up on HN from time to time, but I thought an alternative source of discussion (second link above) might add something new.

[1] if you have never watched this talk completely at least once, give it a shot and you might be very surprised.

I remember feeling frustrated in 1997 as a kid when I uploaded an image via FTP and it was displayed all garbled on the web.

I emailed the academic network admin and he wrote me back that I have to set the mode to BINARY. :)

I'm certainly not confused. I had the very first private "homepage" on our university Graz Hyper-G server before the WWW existed as such. Before the word homepage even existed. Maybe landing page or so. Or default index. I was an early usenet user in the mid 80ies, and browsed the "web", as it was called, before HTTP existed. Prof Maurer was my neighbor. I browsed via our own client and via Emacs, which had multimedia extensions. Didn't know about Project Xanadu then, which existed much earlier. CERN was major gopher center then, but mostly the internet was a web of ftp, email and usenet. The CERN gopher was far behind our services, and the early WWW servers and clients ditto. We had a VR walkthrough client on the web, before the WWW had videos. It was at CERN that I gave a public conference talk, a CAD conference, about the Internet as we knew it in the early 90ies. The CERN had an extremely annoying and broken Novell network. It felt years behind our big university networks.

It was truly amazing already before the WWW existed. But the WWW made that available to the common folks, not just to a few privileged. Just that you didn't knew it, didn't mean it didn't exist. CERN needed a multimedia web to share CAD drawings with annotations, descriptions and links, which exceeded ftp and README. I was one of the worldwide leading CAD experts then. We shared our CAD drawings and knowledge on our Hyper-G web, and had a HTTP bridge. Hyper-G was created as multimedia teaching device, to present enriched hypertext to students. Also via modem dialup, the mupid, similar to the other huge internet community in France, which was a successful BBS-like community, country-wide. Much more advanced than anywhere else. Everybody had it.

Then eventually we got annoyed in our walled garden and broke out to the free WWW. Mosaic, Netscape, Apache. The French ditto. And the BBS and Fidonet users elsewhere. This was called the WWW then, worldwide, not our little university or country webs anymore.