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The web is 30 years old today

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Re: The web is 30 years old today

#161

Post by JNRowe »

ghaff wrote: post #75
bartread wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 examp…

And a few years before that to 1840, people used to perform similar tricks with mail. Prior to the introduction of postage stamps mail was paid on delivery¹, so you could send messages to friends or flood enemies with someone else picking up the cost. There is no new thing under the sun.

[/me holds breath for someone to point out an earlier version.]

¹ https://rmspecialstamps.com/about/history-of-stamps/

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#162

Post by tehlike »

Crazy to think that if I were born just a decade earlier, I would have probably be in a different career. If memory serves my first machine was a rating, then a 120mhz, then p3 800mhz, then amd my dad built, then my first laptop in 2007. Growing up in a developing country, I feel myself lucky. Picked up programming at a very early age, had my first websites (can't remember the order) on virtualave.net/tripod and some regional isp, in addition to serving stuff from my own machine. Learned vb6 and asp, then .net and so on.

Crazy ride, loving every minute

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#163

Post by bserge »

jakeva wrote: post #132
bserge wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, voice control was all the rage for a while... before everyone realized it's just impractical

Maybe you forgot about Siri, Ok Google, Cortana, Alexa?

From what I read on here and Reddit, the majority of people (myself included) use them to set timers, look something up and rarely, dictate messages. And not even half the time - they're useless in noisy environments. A far cry from the complete voice control and feedback we've seen in Sci-fi :/

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#164

Post by krapp »

nalekberov wrote: post #83

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 w…

The web was created for people, and capitalists are also people.

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#165

Post by anonymou2 »

diggan wrote: post #52
benbristow wrote: post #44

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?

Tor is very easy to use, just download the bundle and there you go.

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#167

Post by Strom »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #131
devxpy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom also runs on the web browser last I checked. It's a hidden feature, but you can join meetings without the native app.

What do you mean, hidden? It's just a link.

The link is hidden. It only shows up after waiting.

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#168

Post by icedchai »

rurban wrote: post #159
icedchai wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 multimedi…

I believe all of this, but sorry, it wasn't called the web until HTTP and the first web browser arrived.

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#169

Post by no-s »

ihaveajob wrote: post #141
Apofis wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Technically, older than the web. Unless you were born in the 60s or earlier...

>>Unless you were born in the 60s or earlier...

Just noticed on my most recent birthday I've hit 50 years in computing. I tell my kids "texting is so easy now, in the olden days, we had to go to the data center and take turns messaging each other on the operator console..."

I'm teasing them a bit much because we would go there and message each other, but the neophytes would go to the terminal room and we few cognoscenti would go to the machine room, just down the hall.

However I'm a second generation programmer. My mom learned to program in the era that spanned plugboard machines and mainframe timesharing. Prior to that women who worked in the industry were known as "computers"

Re: The web is 30 years old today

#170

Post by no-s »

andrepd wrote: post #82
gniv wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reminded me of this video of David Bowie from 1999: https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1339427341387313155

The excerpt above it, from "The sovereign individual", is pretty depressing. A brand of techno-optimism that we now see has completely fell flat.

The Sovereign Individual is a futurist observation. Bowie sold his catalog and continued to be great. Others achieved similar transcendence.

Why do you think it's flat? Does it seem mundane now? I experienced that era and it still seems like a magical transformation to me.

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