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The World Wide Web (1994)

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Re: The World Wide Web (1994)

#31

Post by interfixus »

sodapopcan wrote: post #18
blakesterz wrote: post #3

"The burden of the Web on a Linux server was tested by creating a working Web site on a i386-33 Linux machine. During a 40 day span, the PSU Linux WWW received 5375 requests from 1328 different sites around the world. This is an average of 6.9 requests per hour and 165 per day. The Web requests never interfered with any work being done by other users at the machine. A Linux system can easily provide Web services and…

In case those who aren't as old as us are confused, "animated gif" is not a redundant term. There was a time when static gifs were just as common as animated ones, if not more so! :upsidedown-face: (definitely for sure more-so if you include spacer.gif)

More so. Mid-nineties web static images were either jpg og gif. Preferably gifs, which mostly compressed way better for anything but photos. With proper indexing, color limitation, dithering, bitcount, and vigilant observance of proper websafe color palette you could shave amazing extra kilobytes off precious bandwith. Animations were for Geocities.

Re: The World Wide Web (1994)

#32

Post by ogurechny »

sodapopcan wrote: post #18
blakesterz wrote: post #3

"The burden of the Web on a Linux server was tested by creating a working Web site on a i386-33 Linux machine. During a 40 day span, the PSU Linux WWW received 5375 requests from 1328 different sites around the world. This is an average of 6.9 requests per hour and 165 per day. The Web requests never interfered with any work being done by other users at the machine. A Linux system can easily provide Web services and…

In case those who aren't as old as us are confused, "animated gif" is not a redundant term. There was a time when static gifs were just as common as animated ones, if not more so! :upsidedown-face: (definitely for sure more-so if you include spacer.gif)

Even worse, GIF was not intended to be just an “animated image format”, it was “general purpose media streaming format” which incorporated frames/layers, sequence ordering, palette switches, and compression (also, one couldn't be sure that client hardware can decode and paint even a single frame fast enough).

Some old picture book or presentation type GIF files have 0 delay time between frames (doesn't work well with software of later decades, when GIF animations became common), and 0 is “draw as soon as possible” in the specification. Even a simple viewer program without support for metadata or user interaction would have to wait for each frame to be received via modem link, and it would take some time, especially for full screen images. Therefore, a competent GIF viewer software should have an option to simulate 1200 baud download for those old files, and compute the additional delay based on frame size in bytes.

Re: The World Wide Web (1994)

#34

Post by musicale »

jasoneckert wrote: post #5

It's always nice to see early definitions of the Web, because those definitions are something we've largely lost today on a societal level (or confused with the Internet or the cloud). The Internet is a worldwide computer network and the World Wide Web refers to the worldwide collection of web servers (wherever they may be) hosting HTML-accessible content. And the cloud is just a new term for the World Wide Web that…

> cloud is just a new term for the World Wide Web

I think of cloud computing as network-accessible computing resources, often provided by commercial services like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.. (Though private clouds are also a possibility.)

These services typically provide web-based management interfaces and HTTPS-based control APIs, but the computing resources themselves are not tied to the web or HTTP(S). For example I usually interact with cloud computing resources using SSH - a modern equivalent to the remote terminal/remote login protocols that predated the web by decades.

Perhaps you are thinking of CDNs like Cloudflare or Akamai which cache web content for faster access, scalability, and resistance to DDoS?

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