Slashdot Mirror
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!
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?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
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
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
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
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 . . . !!!
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
exactly my point, its an enhancement, unless your a hosting company.... then it makes sense that the web if your medium.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
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.
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 :)
Try this w3.org's Web page.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
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...
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
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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
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.]
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
(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...
Two consecutive articles, two references to pornography. CowboyNeal on the rag or something?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
OK, so it could be argues that it was the advent of the graphical web browser, but that doesn't seem to fit with the usage spikes in the timeline. The NCSA Mosaic browser was around for years before the public got wind of the web. Was it the netscape IPO, I don't think so. Perhaps it was the inclusion of a TCP stack in Windows 95 (as much as it pains me to give Microsoft credit...)
--
--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
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
Cascading Style Sheets were originally developed by Hakon Lie in 1994. Netscape were not interested in the idea at all, they wanted to tie lots of proprietary features to HTML that would lock people into their browser. CSS would make it easy for sites to support both Netscape and IE, so they were firmly against them.
Netscape were also against tables initially. They considered them unnecessary, the real problem was that their parser was yacc based and support for the tables syntax was really hard. They had been taught all the LR(1) stuff in comp sci class but did not realize that since Goldfarb would not have known an LR(1) grammar from a poke in the eye with a sharp stick attempts to parse SGML with an LR(1) parser are doomed to failure since SGML is context sensitive.
Instead of useful stuff like CSS we got a crappy scripting language that for the first three years was so baddly implemented that many browsers would crash when they hit the wrong type of javascript.
The CSS problem could have worked better if the content negotiation scheme had been implemented properly. WAP has a workable scheme, most HTML browsers do not.
My view was (and still is) that the style sheet should be applied on the server side and that web authoring tools such as Frontpage should support both direct entry of text in XML and design of XSL stylesheet converters. I have yet to see a decent package that does not cost a ridiculous amount.
Hopefully the tenth birthday will at least put a stop to those stupid 'Internet Time' stories written by sad hacks with no brains. If the development of the Web was any slower it would grind to a halt. Trying to get anything done still takes at least a year. Paint dries faster.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
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?
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.
10 years, and only 1% of all users have found out how to do something proper with it.