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The Tenth Birthday Of The World Wide Web
UoHCIC writes: "Excerpt from at A Little History of the World Wide Web
"
17 May (1991) Presentation to "C5" Committee. General release of WWW on central CERN machines."
This indicates that the Web was released to the world at large on May 17, 1991." Talk about fast moving: 10 years old, and just look at all the pr0n you can snarf. Imagine where we'll be at 20!
I'm hoping for arbitrary pr0n generated on-demand.
I know this girl I can set you up with Taco. She's really smart and fun to be with :-P
Probably not since LNUX doesn't exist now either as far as I can see.
"Lack of motivation" I think they have more motivation than you will ever have. Hey...let's do it like this. I colonize your country, take you and your family as slaves, then leave, creating a power vacuum in which civil war emerges, then when your home has been burned and plundered, and you're starving to death, I'll drop by and say "Hey...if you only had some more motivation you'd be fine". How about that?
People don't set up home on Barren Wasteland. that's why the Sahara and Siberia are so sparsely populated.
However what tends to happen is that someone lives on a patch of fertile farmland which his family has maintained for centuries and suddenly someone else has a war and steals his entire crop 3 years in a row. They burn his fields and the surrounding forests which according to meteorologists reduces rainfall.
Other people dam the river that fed his field etc...
This all actually happened and what it dose is that what was a comfortable middle class village in Somalia or ethiopia 50 years ago is reduced to a few fathoms below abject poverty.
When aid workers actually arrive they tend to find people dying of starvation hundreds of miles from home because they went searching for some kind of life and found the whole country a barren war ravaged wasteland without the usual stored crops or working irrigation network to keep you through the periodic droughts.
--
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
even the IMG tag wasn't in the initial design, which says something about what they intended the web for!
ASCII porn?
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
in the university in May 1991, the sysadmin called a few students to demonstrate the web with Mosaic 0.9 or something like that, on his X workstation, we went on the Hawaï university site, and the CERN, and some others. At this moment almost all we had was 80x25 text console, doing irc, gopher, rn, etc, and we were wondering what the heck is this graphical stuff that will suck our bandwidth!!!
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
It was the moment that Yahoo went from their Berkeley address to a .com. Anyone else remember when one would go to Yahoo to see if there was a new website up?
I just simply browse with javascript off. It's simply not a power I wish to give to web sites. Like amazon loves to pop up junk every now and then. I'm much happier with javascript off. I simply turn it on when I absolutely must have it. (damn I wish mozilla would support prefs on a site per site basis already) 75% of the time when I visit a site and it needs javascript for a form submital or something equally retarded. I'll close just close the window and be on my merry way.
Yes I realize javascript is useful for some things, but I've been programming web sites for over 2 years now in php/mysql and I've yet to run into a problem that absolutely REQUIRES javascript. I'll use it here and there for "enhancements", but it's never vital to the functionality of the site.
Yeah, I realize that this is offtopic, but you can only say "Happy Birthday Web" in so many ways. Some articles just beg for tangents. :)
---
The internet I hope will not be controled even more by the government. Yet I believe that in the future we will have more thing on the internet to do but less rights to do them.
I was in 6th grade. Now I'm an 'Associate Software Engineer' working on multi-million dollar industrial control software. It's been an interesting 10 years :)
Search first, ask questions later.
Three letters:
A O L
Search first, ask questions later.
No, granted, microsoft is a evil entity and should be destroyed, but .NET is just network appliances built on top of open hardware.
But a paradime shift in how normal people deal with hardware and software is comming. And I for one, welcome it.
In any case, Glad Syttendemai til internet venner vaaren i Norge!
For more information on Norway's constitution day, please visit here (in English): 17.mai
Ok, let's look at the technology.
/close/ to having a full CSS1 implementation this year.
:-)
The web was invented in 1991, and Cacading Style Sheets (CSS1) were standardized in 1996. MSIE6 and Mozilla 1.0 are just getting
That means it has taken half the total life of the web to get user-agent support for even the most basic of web standards. I was working on the web when CSS1 was standardized, and I remember being so excited and waiting to use them in my web pages. I have been waiting a long time.
But I feel the same way about the standards being released today...SVG for example is really cool and I can't wait to use it. The problem is that many of the specifications coming out today are exponentially or at least logarithmically as complex as the ones that came out earlier. Take a look at XML Schema for a good example of this.
Being burned by my continued wait even for wide spread CSS1 deployment, I shudder to think how long it is going to take to have decent implementations of standards being produced today. I will probably have to wait until 2020 before I can serve up an XML page with inline SVG styled with CSS3.
So yeah, whenever anyone makes an outlandish technology prediction about 10 years from now...I can't help but think about this. I know I am being a cynic. I'm going to shut up and going back to isolating and filing CSS1 bugs and test cases for Mozilla
Happy Independence Day, Norway!!!!
Je ne parle pas francais.
somebody wrote:
>>Talk about fast moving: 10 years old, and just look at all the pr0n you can snarf. Imagine where we'll be at 20!
and unformed wrote:
>umm...if i remember correctly, porn was a LOT easier to grab when the net was only 6-7 years old....before the Cyber Decency Act kicked in...
umm
You may be thinking of the Child Online Protection Act, which is presently being challenged at the Appeals Court level, with a review of the decision overturning it possible. But the COPA has been under injunction by an Appeals judge since 1998.
It can be a little hard to get to porn from certain libraries and other public institutions, and child pornography enforcement has stepped up (even while occasionally stomping on some Constitutional fingers), but in general porn remains as available as ever.
(Are you sure you're reading the real news, and not just Slashdot? I know from the editorial accuracy around here it would be hard to keep up.)
Oh, I see, you meant porn you didn't have to PAY for. Well, no wonder.
----
lake effect weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I think it's only a matter of time till /. opens popups to poopsex.com when you try and close your browser...
They call me Moe
Think there will be enough porn "actresses" and "models" to keep up with the demand if there's more porn sites than people (and more people that porn workers)?
Anyone can grab an AOL CD and get online, put their web page up and chat to people across the world
Anyone with a computer can, anyway. That's still far too small a percentage of the population of any western country; taken as a percentage of the world's population, it's ridiculous.
I know that these are still early days, and the fact that the phrase 'digital divide' enjoys currency is testament to the fact that people are at least aware of the problem. But there's a long, long way to go. The web is, I suppose, a reflection of the rest of the world, and it won't be truly egalitarian until individual governments ensure that their respective populations can afford computers (and food). And we all know how likely that is in the next twenty years.
Enjoy it!
Markus
Wow... the www has the same birthday as me! Strange that I never noticed it before...
--
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
how dare you list all that dial-up software without listing the king of dial-up software, that which is Telemate.
Telemate is god.
BilldaCat
Yes they have; it was even mentioned in the intro. pr0n appears to be a profitable web business for some (or many).
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Computers were certainly interconnected more than a decade ago. I courted my first wife via DARPA and she's been gone for more than a decade.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
The internet has been around since 1969 and is 32 years old this year.
dave
It was September 1993, the September that never ended.
Traditionally, each september would see USENET fill up with new students who'd acts like twits for a while until they got up to speed with the conventions of netiquette. When AOL started, there was a continuous influx of twits.
dave
you're not very good at looking.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
i dont think rob's hurting for money currently.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
man usenet has always been the place for things like porn and mp3s. as long as it's not userfriendly enough for senators and lars to use it will remain that way.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
I was finishing my PhD in HEP. I remember browsing info.cern.ch with a VT100. sigh.... And Led Zep wrote the lyrics for today a long time ago: "Ten Years Gone"
No, perhaps not. And yet hundreds of companies of any size, many of whom will never be sexy enough to make Business 2.0 or the Standard, have added enormous value and productivity to their company by using this medium as a tool within a successful business model instead of relying on the medium itself as the business model.
An interesting mention about style sheets on this page about the NeXT browser/editor TBL was demonstrating...
Even if that wasn't in the same context as what we've come to use as CSS now, I wonder why the separation of content from presentation took so long to come around (and is STILL not 100% properly implemented by major browsers) and how it got so far off track around, say, 1996 and the 2.0 browsers.
I knew I should have started a pr0n site a few years back when my old friend Renee decided she wanted to get paid to make "movies". I was sitting on a gold mine, damnit!
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
its ten years old, and yet no one has discovered a viable bussiness model for the internet based company.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
I was still on BBS's.
.qwk packet and spend the next day or so replying to message after message after message..
I was on BBS's until they finally gave up the ghost here in nashville.
I miss BBSing. It was a much closer-knit community. I'll never forget the nights of attempting to redial my favorite bbs until i *FINALLY* got connected.. just to grab a
The net just hasn't touched the same nerve with me. While the information resources are much more grand, there arent many places which offer the same type of atmosphere as a local BBS. People weren't bombarded with ads from local BBS's, it took a fair amount of clue to be able to get one one, for god sakes - Telix, Terminate, procomm, minicom and tip, bluewave and iceedit, renegade and wildcat. Modemfests and gatherings and making friends and enemies through a highly delayed message board.. memories.. *sigh*
Oh, sorry... Nostalgia kicked in.
Someone send me a card. It's my birthday too. Trent Reznor's as well.
I turned 19 today. Hoooooray!
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Not to mention giving you debilitating illnesses which your government and international orginizations are powerless to cure, and thus removing from you even the physical ability to work.
Yes perhaps the citizens of the third world can be critizised as being at fault for some of their misfortunes, but i'll be damned if any American who owns a car, enjoys police protection and was raised on three meals a day and antibiotics will do it.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
For me it was the release of a usable mosaic, and not too long after that, yahoo. I don't remember when mosaic was released, but I remember downloading it and skipping around to different people's web sites. I also remember thinking to myself that this thing was interesting but that it probably wouldn't catch on. Usenet had a nice indexing system in that there were groups identified by interest. So if you had a paritcular interest, you could find resources on Usenet by looking at the names of the groups. But there was no such mechanism with mosaic (I called it "mosaic" at the time for lack of better understanding of what drove it).
So much for my prognostication. I now predict that any predictions from me are sketchy at best. (This bit of self reference brought to you by "Godel, Escher, Bach".)
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
If everyone can make any links he wants, doesn't the whole thing become a hopeless mess?
yes :)
Internet is not the same of the web. The internet is actually older.
:)
But I see your point.
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
I was in 8th grade, dreaming with space travels and video games. And I was a big fan of Chun Li.
:))
In December 1991, I decided that I'll become a computer programmer, and now I'm here.
In May 1996, I set up my first homepage, in Geocities. Five years and I still don't have a decent web site. (Though you may disagree
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
And yet I'm still not understanding why they like pr0n... :)
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
When I entered PUC, they had one of the two bigger subnets of my country, Chile. It was a whole class B, and they still own it.
The first day, internet was alien to me, but as I had some previous computing knowledge, I quickly started to use it regularly.
I discovered the web that day. A week after that, I discovered the USENET, and two months after that, I set up my first web page at Geocities, and the rest is history.
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
Timothy Berners-Lee was presented with an honorary Doctor of Law degree at Columbia University's 247th commencement ceremonies yesterday, May 16th, 2001. He is listed in the program as "Inventor of the Web".
Try this w3.org's Web page.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
remember?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
1994. I was just out of graduate school and teaching physical science in my hometown. I had made friends with an officer from the Naval Postgraduate School who was also an Amateur Radio operator (N7HPR). It would be a year before Netcom would provide dialup for a 14.4 modem, so his ability to dial-in from home with a "secure" line to a Linux box he set up at NPS was novel. He used Trumpet WinSock and NCSA Mosaic, and we stayed up all night playing. It blew my mind, and we both knew what we wanted to do with it: Educate. I never thought anybody would pay me to play that way. The Web was going to be an avocation; they're fools to pay us to do what we do.
This was on the heals of learning about email. I had an account in grad school, but not enough peers in my field had one, so it was rarely used. It wasn't until I had to build a packet radio station while living in Hawaii for two years that I really appreciated digital communications. A letter to my Dad would take a couple of days to hop from the islands to California, no better than the pony express but saving us a great deal in phone bills. Sure helped my Dad understand the concept when I convinced him to get one of those Netcom accounts years later.
All your website are belong to us!
At this link that says that www.transactie.org has been online for 1142 days.
I think Win95 made a BIG difference... although for me, I had a copy of Trumpet Winsock around for a long time before I had Windows 95!
The higher, the fewer.
It did, it really did eat the net. Now I watch and wait for the Web Eater to come. It will, maybe in the form of Quake-ish interface, but it will come.
Two dimensions with pictures and (rare, but always painful) sounds. Plugins that come and go. It's not really an enhancement of the preceeding Gopher.
The net demands more dimension, without having to chug even more bandwidth. Content per byte has certainly diminished in the last 10 years.
I first "saw" the Web at a technical conference held by the Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh in August 1994, right as I was starting as a graduate student at CMU. The first time I saw Mosaic, it was like, "wow, that's it - that's the interface we've been waiting for, it's going to change everything." I think there were something like 10000 sites on the entire Web at that point; not much more. Our class (of 10) had a "home page" contest, which I actually won, for little more reason than that I had multiple pages linked together, and had more topical links than anyone else. :-) What was it then, HTML 2.0? No Javascript, no DHTML, just straight-text early-day HTML and a little CGI on the side.
Why is it that about half the time, I feel like we had more content then than we do now?
Oh well, just another old geezer reminiscing about the good old days, I guess. Of course, back then, Usenet still had a S/N ratio > 0, too...
1996, you say? Interesting. The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 paid for increasing network backbone infrastructure over the next 5 years. Perhaps there's a connection? However, I seem to remember some guy getting a whole lot of shit for taking credit.
TCP/IP. HTTP. graphical web browsers. What do these things have in common? Answer: they were all created with government funding.
Oh of course...junk mail never existed before the net. And child pr0n? invented in 1991 as well. Don't be such a sucker for the popular media - the net is a mechanism, nothing more nothing less. It lets people share things, what they choose to share tells you about the people, not the mechanism.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
CERN Committee: Eh? OK Tim, um, sounds great...
Trying to find something on the internet is like searching for the page you need in a library hit by a hurricane...
...with the lights turned out.
I had just accepted my current job. My second day here, the head librarian asked me to set up a machine with modem. Then we sat down and started "playing" with mosaic, gopher and archie. Six years later all machines on campus have highspeed access via the campus network.
go from freedom, openness to opression, regulation, totalitarianism?
Bjarne
You're just mad because your wife read that article too and started looking over your shoulder when you were on the computer.
Inevitable, obvious, but still a little bit sad. Can anyone remember how many logins there were for www at info.cern.ch (i seem to recall it was about 20)?
I've still got a printout somewhere, about 10 pages of 6-point print but it was, at the time (late 1993) "the complete list of world-wide-web servers".
All .edu, .gov, .mil, .net or countrycodes (mainly .ac.*). Still no such thing as .com.
Just unthinkable only 8 years later.
Progress, eh?
TomV
Yeah, JeffK 0wns the www.
You just don't have the right sites, ask Taco, I'm sure he's got a list to share :)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
umm...if i remember correctly, porn was a LOT easier to grab when the net was only 6-7 years old....before the Cyber Decency Act kicked in...
That may be true for those who only casually delve into the dank depths of the pornographic underworld, but since then pr0n has been corraled into more specific locations; salacious IRC channels, usenet (though that's really a pain), and all about independent ftp servers.
Not only is it more abundant, and more concentrated, but it is also of higher quality. 4 years is a long time for improvements in digital photography and scanning equipment.
let's have a 10 popup window salute!
go to your favorite pr0n site... then press the "Back" button
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Maybe in 10 year there won't be much pr0n on the net because everyone reached saturation levels and got bored with it! .... maybe not.... >:)
....Be careful of dueling with dragons - you are crunchy and taste good with tomato sauce....
I was hanging out in gopherspace, listening to my friends brag about hypertext and I was jealous because my PC wasn't capable of 'graphics'. Hmmm... amazingly, I still use pine for email.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
let's have a 10 popup window salute!
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Email is a great thing, as is the "www". Easy access to information in a fast and simple way. Thats proper to me :) Communication, with friends and others, booking tickets, buying stuff online, searching, newsgroups... Thats pretty proper i'd say... And more then 1 % online are using those services :)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Do you know how your car works? Or your fridge? Maybe a slot machine?
99% of people simply need to know insert gas here or put food into me to stay fresh (extra credit -- guess which one applies to what). Thats why we have mechanics and Maytag men. Just becauase we're all geeks and actually want to know how the world works, doesn't mean everyone does. In fact, I guarantee we're in the minority.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
I worked at a daily newspaper from 1994 on, and it wasn't until maybe 1996-97 that we were able to refer to the Internet without defining the term.
my slashdot is set to text only. when i first used the internet, it was on netscape. i used to hate getting on pages with pictures as they always took too long to load. nowdays, it's not just pictures ... but flash.
how i long for the good old days....
then again ... this is what the internet's about ... otherwise, we'd all be using gopher.
I hate this argument. Let make sure every third world country has all the advantages we have.
Here's an idea, maybe the people that setup homes in barren wastelands and then decide to have a couple dozen kids should not be saved. It's cruel, but be realistic.
It's not like it's a car accident. They chose to have children despite their situation and their lack of motivation to correct it.
I'll drop by and say "Hey...if you only had some more motivation you'd be fine". How about that?
Sounds good to me. It's called survival. If that much shit happens to me, I should either find a way to survive or I'll die. Being a human completely capable of adapting, I should be able to accept that. So instead of learning the latest programming language, I'll have to learn how to be a carpenter and make myself a hut as well as how to hunt for animals instead of software bugs.
It's called life. Who the hell decided the way Americans live is the way everybody should live?
I work so I can do better than just get by. I work so my children can have a future as well as myself. Having to start from scratch wouldn't change that motivation.
i wonder when the mass media will be able to refer to linux with out having to define it -- "an OS developed by linus and a loose knit band of hackers across the internet". i prefer it when they say "an alternative to MS windows operating system", but still..
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
I remember in 1993 (I think) viewing a web site with Mosaic of this Library of Congress Exhibit that University of North Carolina had put together. I was very impressed and thought it was way cool. What also was cool is that there was already weather info on the web. (I am a meteorologist.) I think it was Weather Underground that University of Wisconsin(?) was running. (Weather Underground was also on gopher at that time and had several gopher sites at a variety of universities. Weather Underground is still the place I go for forcasts (www.wunderground.com) though it is no longer connected with a university. Gopher died because it was half way between ftp and WWW.)
I was definitely caught up with WWW. I played a few beta versions of Netscape before Netscape 1.0. And always I got the latest Netscape. I think that was true of alot of people. So perhaps it is understandable that Microsoft (with web-like ideas of its own) was taken by surprise with WWW and Netscape. I am amazed at how fast Microsoft was able to turn itself around. Funny thing is Sun has always had this statement that "The network is the computer" and it has turn out to be true today though it is Microsoft, not Sun and Netscape, that has made it a reality and is pushing it the hardest today.
It is nice to almost be in on the ground floor of the WWW. (Same is true of Linux, but it is not quite the revolution that WWW is. In fact in September Linux will be 10 years old. I remember the usenet posting to the Minux newsgroup, announcing Linux.)
To think in 1988 when my department got connected I was unhappy about having to learn new things like telnet, ftp, and email. What a wonderful thing the Internet turned out to be.
Suddenly the WWW appeared. This ended this golden era. Everyone wanted the internet. The media got a hold on the idea and it has never been possible to explain to them the difference between the web and the internet since. No more research is interesting to anyone unless its web based. This network has been reduced to another tool for the corporations to force their content onto us.
The last hope for a free populace was eliminated, because the sheeple just wanted another form of passive entertainment
That way, after another 10 years, the web will be choking under the weight of 6.871947e+11 porn sites...
Yeah, but you'll only have to visit the one site. The rest will open up automatically in separate pop-up windows.
--
I would be a paid subscriber if Taco and Hemos weren't such cunts
What is this, a vast right-wing conspiracy? Without Al Gore, we'd still be sending faxes.
Er, wait. Make that every six months their number doubled. That way we end up with more than 2 million from an original 10 [estimates].
That way, after another 10 years, the web will be choking under the weight of 6.871947e+11 porn sites, many times more than the projected population of the Earth.
[Something to think about.]
Were where you when the Web was invented? I'll feel really old if most of you say "grade school." I was 38.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
Mosaic was what made the WWW into something one would want to bring to the masses. Specifically, when NCSA hacked up this IMG tag mess, much less thought-out than, say, the FIG (or was it FIGURE?) tag that the w3c eventually designed but couldn't get industry to accept. The IMG tag made the WWW into whiz-bang technology that got people excited.
MIT had a system called TechInfo that made it much easier to provide information to the net than the WWW did, but its acceptance was limited by the non-sexiness of plain text. With the WWW, people were willing to do extra work because the result looked so cool in Mosaic.
He pushed legislation which opened up the NSFNET to businesses, etc. AFAIK, he never claimed to have invented the technology when speaking about his involvement. In a sense, the legislation did create the network we now know as the Internet.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Back in 1993 I remember a friend of mine who was working part time at NCSA told me about this cool new application called Mosaic. We went to one of the labs late at night to check out this new thing being called the WorldWideWeb. I'll never forget that.
You are only popular on the Internet.
I'll never forget the time a friend of mine who was working at NCSA part time showed me Mosaic for the first time late at night in one of our labs in 1993. Eventhough there were only a handful of research sites it was still fun to think of the possibilities.
You are only popular on the Internet.
Which would explain why the web acts like a 5th grader
Beware typoes.
(Don't get me wrong, I can sympathize)
Blue skies... Barthie burgers... girls.
Talk about fast moving: 10 years old, and just look at all the pr0n you can snarf. Imagine where we'll be at 20!
umm...if i remember correctly, porn was a LOT easier to grab when the net was only 6-7 years old....before the Cyber Decency Act kicked in...
I only had shell access (they banned slirp at uni).... so it was good old lynx for me....
----- One piece short of Legoland
Remeber where you were when you first used the Web? I was at my father's office at the local University right after he had just been hooked up to the 'net. God bless NCSA Mosiac, Veronica, Archie, Gopher and all the rest! The days when the net was good!
Two consecutive articles, two references to pornography. CowboyNeal on the rag or something?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I think it started getting popular in 1995...right before that fscking TIME article on cyberporn that I pretty much blame for the downfall of the WWW as we once knew it.
Although it may have been concieved of and deployed in academia in 1991, the public at large had not truly begun to adopt the technology until perhaps 1996. Since then, the technolohy has leap-frogged along in it's development but what would you say was the defining moment that facilitated public consumption of the technology? Was it a particular IPO, a particular announcement by a specific company? Any suggestions?
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
> Um, we still have that knowledge gap. The vast majority
> of people who use AOL work on faith and believe in magic...
> they don't know much about what's going on inside their machines.
You're right, of course, but the point is that they're using those machines, where ten years ago nobody without a large degree of acumen even went near them. As much as I despise AOL, it does provide the "have-nots" with impetus for getting to know the basics so they can get online.
> Ah, yes, that's the productive way to run a system:
> Force out anyone who spots a flaw, so that the system never need improve.
Not exactly. The system did "improve" (I quote the term since I don't know if going to a paid-by-advertising model is an improvement, but at least it's economically viable) and now this user is lamenting the change. His comment is, "if you don't like how the system has changed to stay operable, leave it." The flaw in this case is the person who says advertising sucks without providing a realistic alternative.
One last note: "Blockquoth" is a great term. I plan to use it on occasion.
Virg
Damn, you beat me to it. Wish I had a mod point for you.
Virg
> Check out those screenshots of the first browser-editor-wp
> extension. We've hardly moved at all.
Yeah, the last time I logged into battle.net to play Diablo II online, I thought to myself, "this is so much like Lynx!" Here's a good general rule: on networks where the content is the reason you get on the network, more is better. We've moved quite a lot, in fact.
Virg
> Anyone know of a source of tech. news that is run by people
:)
> with some sense of decency and morality?
I thought you'd guess by now. People with a sense of decency and morality don't run tech news web sites.
Virg
> Before the web came along, the internet was the home
> of intelligent discussion, and academic research. It
> was a wonderful means of communication.
Two things: first, the intelligent folk still gather on the Internet, and second, it's still a wonderful means of communication. I'm a member of a Moot that's entirely email-based, and I therefore have opportunities to discuss topics I'd never otherwise know with very smart people I'd never otherwise meet. I can converse for free with my friends who live hundreds of miles from me, and my father and I often share online games.
> Suddenly the WWW appeared. This ended this golden era.
"Golden era"?!? I think I'd have to argue with you there. I ran a BBS for many years, and I thoroughly enjoyed the sense of community that it engendered, but I don't look back on my BBS days with longing to return to the "golden age". Perhaps you're glossing over the fact that there was so much less available on the pre-1991 Internet, or perhaps you have no need for, and therefore no appreciation of, what out there now.
> Everyone wanted the internet. The media got a hold on the idea
> and it has never been possible to explain to them the difference
> between the web and the internet since. No more research is interesting
> to anyone unless its web based. This network has been reduced to
> another tool for the corporations to force their content onto us.
It's okay that everyone wants the Internet, it's not their fault that the mainstream media confuses WWW and the Internet, and since non-WWW research is (I'm guessing) interesting to you, and it's certainly of interest to me, you can't very well make statements that nobody cares about anything but the Web. And also, you're assuming a lot to say the the only use of the WWW is as a corporate propaganda tool. There's a lot out there that isn't corporate, and saying that the influx of advertising and other content by business has spoiled the Web is very much like saying that roads serve no use other than as a repository for billboards.
> The last hope for a free populace was eliminated, because
> the sheeple just wanted another form of passive entertainment.
Ah, here's the rub. "How dare those sheeple demand that the Internet give them anything other than what I deem appropriate" is your message. How very elitist of you. How odd that your statement so closely reflects the lamentation of the Women's Temperance League about how bawdy stories and romance novels had ruined libraries as a repository of higher knowledge and drawn the unwashed masses into their doors. You are right to assume that some people want the Web to be just another form of passive entertainment. You are wrong, however, to assume that all users that use and enjoy the Web are sheeple that don't know any better than to be led around by their credit cards.
I've been working with (and on) the Internet since my school days almost twenty years ago, and I don't seem to recall any "golden age" back then. It was usually a big pain in the ass, mostly because of "more learned than you" types like yourself. Get over it, and try the Web for real. You might enjoy what you find.
Virg
May 17 is my country's independence day. You're asking me why I'm not out celebrating? Well maybe I will next year, knowing I now have one more reason to do so :)
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
I recall in a training booklet for a course for accountants in NZ (now chartered accountants, apparently) I purloined briefly in 1997, they described each era of the Internet and wave of new users as waves of settlers, i.e. academics, e-commerce/'dotcoms', military as so on. Rambling aside, I wonder who the next settlers will be, and who'll be the settlers at twenty?
Jonathan Ah Kit - Lower Hutt, New Zealand - jonathan@metalab.unc.edu
This is a great example of how far we haven't come at all. 10 years to develop and exploit and what have we got .... thousands of more users looking at the same crap on thousands more sites - not better or different - just more.
Check out those screenshots of the first browser-editor-wp extension. We've hardly moved at all.
We should all light a candle and take a picture from outerspace to represent the current structure of the WWW. This is cool news.
Seeka
Now everybody has more than that. I don't know anyone with an encyclopedia anymore, and I can't remember the last time I saw an atlas. Information is so available that we don't think about it, and with google, you don't even need any research skills. Things just get better.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Maybe in 20 years the www will seem more mature, since it appears to be run by a bunch of 10 year olds now.
... and you've scaled beautifully.
;) Now there are hundreds of streams available at any hour of the day (Rob, not that kind of stream... :))
;)
As someone pointed out earlier, the IMG tag wasn't even in the original spec for HTML. Look at how far we've come: JavaScript, DHTML, ActiveX, Java, Flash... I remember seeing one of the first (real) webcams come online in 1992/3 (it was of Niagra Falls). It was very impressive back then; new pictures every minute.
A T1 was fast.
Linux wasn't even built.
"NetMeeting" type stuff was new. Remember cuseeme? The original? Before they started charging?
Online gaming was mostly terminal-based, almost no graphical games.
Music on the PC? Cee Dee quality? No. Besides, it would have eaten up all of those 40-120MB drives.
The Internet has scaled from an internal, United States based government network to a worldwide, always-on, public network... In a matter of a few decades.
Do you like German cars?
This is pretty cool. Think about it, there were like 20 WEB SITES when this first debuted. Now there's amiallyourbaseornot.com. Now that's just weird.
blog & fiction: jd87
If not, why are crazy parents putting children in the age of four in front of their mast^H^H^H^Hcomputers then?
Working in the field of human factors, I fully agree with you in that it is the machines', or better the designers' and developers', fault if people encounter difficulties. Every careful reader of Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things oder Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column knows that.
The interesting thing is, most people don't. They surely notice when getting confused by some software, web site, or gadget, but they are drawing the wrong conclusion that they had to learn how to use it, or that their children should learn it as early as possible, and things like that. Just a few hours ago I encountered a colleague who complained about usability of some web site. It took me a while to assure her there really are incompetent "web designers" who do not care about users and do not really understand the concepts behind web technology. And this happens over and over.
And things are getting worse. The Internet not only brought to us a lot of incompetence in user interface design, but also a tendency to make three steps backwards unnecessarily. We are told the web browser will be the user interface for everything in the future, because "everyone can use a browser" (how about the application inside the browser?), our personal computers get replaced by "thin clients", and typing on a mobile phone's tiny keypad is considered an adequate way of making payments. In short, we are going back to terminals and transactions, and beyond.
Even cool sites like /. are affected. I would prefer to type into a real text editor instead of this text entry box. I would like an auto-save function for everything I write built into my /. client, like the one in my favourite Usenet newsreader. I would really appreciate a more flexible, i.e. not page oriented, presentation of comments, which my favourite Usenet newsreader provides as well. Don't get me wrong; /. is quite usable if one considers the limited capabilities of a web browser. But those capabilities are not sufficient for most interactive applications.
Recommended reading:
C. Fellenz, J. Parkkinen, H. Shubin: Resolving conflicts between the desktop and the Web
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
By the way, as Heise (in German) reports, The Royal Society has recently elected Tim Berners-Lee as a fellow for his work regarding the Web.
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
I remember way back when... A 2400bps modem on my Commodore 128. I wasn't even using the internet, I was still using FidoNet. I first got a look at the web on my dad's laptop work computer, and was excited to find so much info on Commodore computers, it was great. Windows 3.11, Netscape 3.x. Ahhh... Not that I can't find the info now, but it seemed more innocent back then, it was all new. No banner ads, no popup windows, just information. Ohwell.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
You have to have a computer first© Or the cash to use a cyber cafe ¥unless you're in India© Computers are not still "free" ¥if you can count millions of advertisments free, and if you can't afford food on the table, you're not going to be popping several hundred dollars just to see the web©
How is the fact that they enabled the Webification of thousands of pinks and high school girls who just want to chat and meet guys--how is that a GOOD thing?
So what, should only the priviliged few be allowed to be online? How is that a good thing? We live in a modern democracy in which everyone is supposed to be able to have the same opportunities, and services like AOL provided that. Without them there would have been an ever-increasing knowledge gap between the elite "haves" and the masses of "have-nots".
All it does is justify the existance of things like doubleclick and other garbage-producing companies.
What the hell is wrong with advertising? Without it you wouldn't be reading this site and posting such nonsense, because it wouldn't exist. If you don't like this system, move to Cuba.
At this landmark occasion in the web's history we can look back and see just how much things have changed, and for the better, in the last ten years.
To start with, the web was an academic project to allow scientists to communicate more easily without the limitations of email. Since then it has grown massively, shedding the ivory tower textual paradigm to become the most popular part of the net by far, and the driving force behind the massive growth in the amount of people who have net access, a thing which we all agree is good.
Nowadays the web is a reflection of modern life rather than a bastion for the priviliged few. Anyone can grab an AOL CD and get online, put their web page up and chat to people across the world, and without services like AOL we would still be stuck in the situation we had in 93, where there was a marked lack of content and none of the features we take for granted nowadays. Heck, even the IMG tag wasn't in the initial design, which says something about what they intended the web for!
I'm hoping that the continuing growth in ordinary, real people coming online will further fuel the technological advances that have made the web such an interesting place today, and that cheaper and faster access will mean another explosion in useful content for us all.
Um, we still have that knowledge gap. The vast majority of people who use AOL work on faith and believe in magic... they don't know much about what's going on inside their machines.
More elitism. Why should everyone have to know how their computers work? The fact that people encounter difficulties through not having such knowledge is a flaw in computer systems, not the people using them. Technology after all, should be our tool rather than our master, which is why Windows is still far better on the desktop than Linux.
.. isn't the Linux OS due for its 10th birthday this year sometime too? Anyone know when?
It's one of the main branches doing money : explain to people how to invest into net. Most of them must have been 2nd hand car dealer, or such, before...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
In 20 years, I wonder if the web will still exist at all. Maybe we'll have found something much better, like a world of virtual reality contacts, where we don't need internet anymore.
Imagine, online porn will be much nicer then ;-)
One of the reasons why .NET is doomed to fail hopelessly is that it is windows-only. The other is that .NET costs money.
.NET. People will use linux rather than paying $1000 for windows. And would you pay $1 per hour for using word (.NET strategy)? Or rather use AbiWord? I know you'll use AbiWord (or StarOffice, KWord, whatever) if it comes to choosing and that is *exactly* why .NET will fail.
The success of internet is it's possibility to run on any platform that supports an open standardized networking implementation and all this being free.
.NET will be windows-centered. Especially with macOS X and the coming gnome-2.0 (with a fast , stable mozilla and nautilus), nobody will ever pay for something like
Nice question for the slashdot poll: is more than 50% of your software legal and what OS do you use? Hypothesis: 50% no/windows, other 50% yes/linux.
Imagine where we'll be at 20!
There will be TWICE as much pr0n? Sweet!
So, if you're ever in a position where you could die unless someone intervenes to save you, we should all just turn away because you were too stupid to avoid taht situation?
Dinivin
10 years, and only 1% of all users have found out how to do something proper with it.
What do you define as proper?
Frankly, I'd be more disturbed by the fact that indoor plumbing as been around for hundreds (thousands, really) of years, but millions of people (if not billions of people) still don't have that simple "luxury." Or that we've been able to control the flow of electricty for centuries, but billions of people still don't seen to have that simple luxury, either. Maybe we should worry about getting people up to the basics before we start worrying about the fact that so few people have found a proper use of the world wide web.
Dinivin
... what the oldest page on the web is?
That is, the page that has been available on the web continuously and without change for the longest time.
Alternatively - what is the oldest server on the internet? That is - the server that has been continuously connected to the internet (preferably at the same IP) for the longest time.
Suggestions anyone?
*blinks*
Wow.... it's older than I am... or at least more mature.
Nietzsche on Diku:
sn; at god ba g
:Backstab >KILLS< god.
Norway is so far ahead in technology, that we chose to make the birth of the web our national day...
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Imagine where we'll be at 20! :-)
Still waiting for ipv6 to bring more IP adresses
10 years, and only 1% of all users have found out how to do something proper with it.