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10 Years of the World Wide Web
NCSA Mosaic was first released ten years ago today (oh, I guess you could mark time from the 1.0 release, but who's counting), marking the first milestone in the evolution of the graphical World Wide Web. HTTP was originally developed between 1989-1991, but didn't take off until there was a useful browser which could display inline images. You can still download old versions of Mosaic from browsers.evolt.org. So, all you folks who think you have a real handle on technological progress: what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?
Wow.. After downloading and looking at "NCSA MOSIAC FOR MS WINDOWS" it's amazing how LITTLE the browser has changed..
All major innovations, such as URL bar, Forward/Back buttons, reload and home buttons, as well as bookmarks are allready in place. It even has a Search bar!
90% of the "features" of a browser haven't changed in the last 10 years.. It really makes you wonder how often people re-think an interface, or if they just use and evolve what they are used to.
I'm honestly curious, what major innovations have we seen?
Snapback [Apple Safari]
Tabbed browsing, and related enhancements (such as Open a group of tabs) [Mozilla, etc]
Umm.....?
One other feature I found interesting is that in NCSA Mosaic, there was a "annotate" function.. Presumably this let people add to a page, if the server were set properly, almost like a WIKI situation?
Did anyone ever work with this?
Colin Davis
How did he get first post rights and manage to download, install, and review software in less than a minute?
Man, I remember back in 1993 I was a sophomore in college. My FIRST experience with the web was Mosaic on a DECstation. I was telling people, this sh*t is way cool...
;)
Then...it got MUCH better...
I found p0rn....
It will take forever for the 3d holograms to load over a broadband cable connection. Also, the psychic popup ads will be a real pain....
The first time I saw an image displayed on the web, without having to decode it, etc. WOW, that was the COOLEST thing ever. I knew it was going to take off, but had no idea it would ever exceed my wildest dreams. Ah, the web back then, unspoiled by commercial entities, a playground for the intellectuals. Oh, and mostly devoid of any content. :) But it was COOL.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
as long as it provides a way to stop those damn pop ups...
itll be all programs for downloading and creating your very own woman using your biowheel printer.
Ok, a man can dream, cant he?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Maybe we'll get the .web registry to go through.
-Valiss
Sites like these:
a by-game.html
http://www.matazone.co.uk/feed-the-nine-mouthed-b
Behold, the greatness of the Internet.
My NeXT was running web clients in 1991 or 1992. Not much to see, if you didn't put it up.
Mosaic was a milestone, but it didn't mark the start line.
I know what I would like to see in that we are all on internet2 living in a free society however I think what we might actually have is that everyones 10GB fibre optic links which will be saturated by people streaming porn onto the 3d holographic projectors and pop-ups will be sales men who literally pop up.
:)
Also spam will acount for 99% of all email which will all be in XHTML v9.0 and people will still be trying to get FP on slashdot
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
...new fangled and silly. I was 18 when I started using Mosaic at University, and thus it was hip and happening. But now it's all bells and whistles, and everyone went and got themselves in a big damned hurry. And youngsters these days, well...
And then about two years later some bozo invented the flash tag and irrevocably ruined the internet for all of eternity.
It will look invisible. But who will care with all the Flying cars, space elevated vacations, and TeamFortress3 action!
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...that no one will be able to use the internet at by that time thanks to THE GREAT IP CRUNCH OF 2010.
I predict: Something like CubicEye!
Ha! In ten years the internet will be wireless signals broadcast directly into your brain, stimulating your various senses. It will be, "have you 'felt' this site?" Go Porn industry!
Of course a lot of people are still using Mosaic, at least in some sense. Internet Explorer is derived from it (look at the text in the about box).
Streams of japanese characters running vertically down the screen...
what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?
To the 2003 web surfer, I'd have to guess it's going to be strangley, deafeningly mute of spam and popups and junk in general. And if you casually leaned over and asked the 2013 web surfer where the spam went, I bet they'd go "the whuh?" I'll leave it wide open how I'm supposing something like that could happen...
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
It will look about the same. TV's still have screens - so will PCs. If anything, it may be in more of a 3D environment.
By the way things are going the internet will probably be 80% porn movies and pics, and 19% 3d porn.
... will look like ass.
Anybody else see "fad" technologies out there now? Anybody have a guess as to which ones will stick?
1) Mozilla 2.0 will be released, taking over 10 days to compile on the Athlon Hyperhammer 9000+ and will take up 20 tb of disc space. .net will face 7.1 surround sound 3d holographic pop up in your face adverts from the lastest gator.
2) Konqueror will still be less than 1 mb in size and will support all the features that mozilla does thanks to Qt 7.0.
3) People still stupid enough to use Internnet explorer
4) 99.99% of the worlds e-mail will be spam, and Hormel foods has renamed their product to SPENG.
5) My town will finally be able to get adsl broadband.
what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?
:(
Television
Tell me I am not an optimist:
1) Retinal scan, thumb print and DNA test required for authentication.
2) Registration and tracking in national and international databases of governments and corporations. This tracks your access point and methods as well as the data you access and networks traversed.
3) Pay per microsecond based on access to copyright data and use of copyright and patented technologies.
4) All govenments, corporations and point of sale terminals are based on the technology.
5) Hardware locked software that enforces all of the above.
Did the person expect to get any other types of comments?
Well, I won't say for sure, but I think there is a strong chance that the same man largely responsible for the last ten years could play a role in the evolution over the next ten years as well...
The Semantic Web.
This internet thing is a fad. I am confident it will all blow over by 2013, and we'll all be back to using Morse Code, as God intended.
I don't know if this is a prediction or a hopw, but I imagine broadband prices dropping to something affordable - 50 bucks a month cuts a whole lot of people off from the true advantages of the 'net - always on connections, automatic system updates, information on demand, movie trailers and the like. I pay $5 a month now for dialup, I see no reason why cheap broadband isn't too far in the future as well.
Triv
I work at milton-freewater sykes that takes outsourced msn calls.
MSN Tech Support
Seldom Asked Questions
General
Q: Who the hell are you and why are you writing this?
A: I'm a level 3 tech, and I'm writing this because some truth needs telling.
Q: Is MSN seperate somehow from Microsoft proper? Sometimes I get that impression talking to the techs.
A: Your impression was correct, but for a very different reason entirely.
The reality is that, except for a very small group of testers (The Microsoft Bench Team, who tell Redmond what kind of calls they receive on the floor as techs, and have no more power to help you than any other agents), the technician you are speaking to does not actually work for Microsoft. Instead, he works for such companies as ACS, Stream, Sykes, and Teleperformance. Under no circumstances will the person you are speaking to reveal that himself; that would get him fired.
Q: WTF? I haven't heard of any of those companies.
A: They're call centers. Instead of actually hiring people to man the phones itself, Microsoft has contracts with other companies. This arrangement is known as outsourcing.
Q: So how much are they getting paid?
A: Lower-level techs make a couple dollars over minimum wage. Tier 3 isn't being paid enough to care, either.
Q: What tools are the technicians using?
A: The primary tool every technician uses is something called PAM, Phoenix Account Management. This, like every other Microsoft product, is poorly programmed with a slow, buggy interface. So when the tech says "Your ticket number is.. uhh..", that tech has just clicked "Save Ticket" but his PAM is being too slow and may not give the ticket number for several seconds.
On the Phone
Q: Is the tech/rep just trying to get me off the phone ASAP? He's getting paid by the hour, right- why should he care?
A: Because he is graded on something called Average Handle Time. The contracts drawn up by Microsoft and the outsourcing companies may vary, and are never shown to the techs on the floor, but one thing is true- it is always less efficient for the outsourcing company for its techs to take long calls. This is passed down to the techs in the form of AHT. Lower-level techs are usually much more concerned with AHT than higher-level ones. This is because higher-level techs are more apt to deal with long, complicated issues, thus their AHT is higher and not focused on quite as much.
Q: Sometimes I get the feeling that there's something the tech really wants to say, but can't.
A: You know how the recording says "This call may be recorded for quality purposes?" It often is. There are many things the technician may not say on the telephone- and if you're speaking to anything less than a level 3 tech, those may include solutions. They have to transfer you to a higher tier for that person to try the fix. You may think that's ridiculous, and it is. The reason hinges on AHT. Similarly, Level 3 agents are not allowed to call the phone companies for DSL issues themselves. Why not? It raises AHT and outbound calls cost money. Never mind what the benefit of that might be to you, the user. You are only a bit player in Microsoft and the outsourcing companies' grandiose play.
Q: I think the tech was a bit perturbed at me. It showed in his voice.
A: You must have really pissed him off. Call-center employees have two things preventing them from sounding angry: a general apathy towards you as a customer, and mental discipline preventing them from showing their emotions over the phone. If the technician shows in any way annoyed with you, he personally, fiercely hates you and would love to beat your head into the ground. Relax; five minutes after he gets off the phone with you, the technician will likely have forgotten who you were, except as a story to tell the other techs.
Of course, if he didn't, your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address are all on his screen. And if it's a hi
We'll still be using the web to find out the release date for "Duke Nukem Forever".
Gimme karma, bitches.
Mosaic was the first web browser I ever used. I used it on what was, if I recall correctly, the first version of Slackware. I thought both things were the second and third neatest things after toast.
It is interesting to think back to that time and compare it to where we are today. In some ways things have improved and changed dramatically, and in some ways, things are still the same. I am very encouraged by the progress made during the last 10 or so years and I am greatly interested in what the next 10 years have to bring.
Game... blouses.
The WEB will looking just like it did in the early 90's. In 3000 the WEB will have more controls for big corporations and governments. More porn and advertisements. Why change something when you are making money and power, hand over fist? As a young male, I'm bored to tears of these times. No money, more taxes and more controls on the masses.
As useful as the Web has become, I still feel a bit nostalgic for the days when it was ruled by educational institutions, geeks, government agencies and porn. Life without banners....ahhh :)
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
The current "computer industry" doesn't see the web as an application development enviornment. They see it as an advertising/marketing showplace. Some people (education/individuals/orgs) see it as an information sharing and collecting service (which is what www was supposed to be). However the only new thing that I've seen that made me go "hey, that's pretty nifty, and sort of new" has been the advent of "Web Services" such as XML based applications like Watson and now Sherlock 3 from Apple. Where content is pulled from a source but the source isn't exactly all planned out. It's annoying to have to look at some websites that are just flash animations and pretty fonts that look like scribblings of a demented 4 year old. I want the info, the words that mean something, the movie clip, the data. I don't want your love of the color puce to make me want to retch when I'm trying to look up a flight time, or read and article (web designers, take note, you know who you are, and I hate you because of it).
We should be using the web more as a resource for storing and retrieving data. Graphics and pretty page layouts are nice and all but if I could, I'd abolish most of it and just look for a summary of the info with a little link saying "Want to know more? Click here..."
Blarg.
It's the data.
It's all about the data.
Information wants to be in your pants.
In Soviet Russia, the pants are in the hot grits.
Bleh.
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
The first time I saw Mosaic was August 1993. I couldn't understand why its supporters were so enthusiastic. After all, it was just Gopher with pictures, right? And Gopher was the standard.
The internet will be deemed evil because it can be used as a method to fund terrorism. Shortly after this declaration, all forms of internet will be outlawed in the 'free world'. Slashdotters, who will all of a sudden have no where to socialize, will wander the streets, spouting "In Internet North America, we used to say 'In Soviet Russia..'" In turn, they too will be banished...to greenland... and the U.S. will force greenland to change is name to terroristland.
I KNOW, I SAW IT IN A DREAM!!!!!
The first browser was called WorldWideWeb, more info where. His first release was in Christmas 1990. So, the World Wide Web is 12 years old.
Our children will just seem to pop up out of nowhere, and will all be very friendly and knowledgable. They will even keep track of the places you go, and the things you like.
Ah, love.
..in ten years, you'll be able to smell it thru your monitor..
Can't wait for smell-o-vision..
Sing While You May!!
In 2013, webservers will have become conscious and slashdotting will be considered the worst act of cruelty by PETA.
The pornograph is 10 years old! And I think we all know how to celebrate. ;-)
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
because my main browser is:
Lynx Version 2.8.4rel.1 (17 Jul 2001)
libwww-FM 2.14, SSL-MM 1.4.1, OpenSSL 0.9.6c
I hope that someone realizes that using "www" with 9 syllables is a silly way to abbreviate "world wide web" with 3.
So, all you folks who think you have a real handle on technological progress: what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?
It will look like CowboyNeal!!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
information-access-over-electronic-networks? I'm not sure what that is, but I should probably patent it now just in case it takes off.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
When I remember how excited everybody got with the introducion of the <CENTER> tag
Every damn page became centered overnight.
And the day the <BLINK> tag first made an entry, I wanted to go shoot a large hoarde of web "designers".
Each time a new advance was made, there was always a bunch of people who never learnt the rule - "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".
I think they design Flash web sites now.
My prediction is that they'll still be doing whatever the equivalent is in 2013 :)
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
There was a text-based browser before Mosaic, written at CERN and called www. That's the earliest web browser. I even remember using on a shell account in 1992 or so, though an early version of Lynx was available as well.
In the interests of Internet history, I'd like to see www. It should be able to run fine on a Linux system, as it's a simple line-based program. However, I haven't been able to find a copy, as browsers.evolt.org doesn't go back that far. Does anyone have the source?
In 2013, the internet will be too bogged down by spam and porn!
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Hobbes' Internet Timeline
I've only been on the web 8 years but shoot, I remember seeing a ton of changes in just that relatively short time.
.
:)
.com boom hit and everything went down the tube. We all kept on hoping that the "Next Big Thing" would come forth from it and we put up with all the B.S. that the bean counters brought in, always waiting for something new to emerge from these new gigantically funded companies.
.
.com boom. . . .
I remember when nobody had pop-up ads, and when the banner ad thing first started. Remember the original link exchange rings? Also remember what kind of sites had them? No reputable site would dare have a banner on it!
The no frames movement? Hey that one actually succeeded more or less! Of course it helped that frames where outdated by tables and eventually style sheets of various forms, lol!
I remember when the "Next Big Thing" was VRML. I also remember how buggy the VRML players where. It was crazy, the Japanese did have a few good VRML attractions though.
Best of all I remember being able to do a web search for *COUGH* not so legal *COUGH* applications and not coming up with a ton of porn sites! Heya imagine that! lol
Of course I also remember doing insanely complicated regular expression searches just to FIND any data. Search engines sucked to such a large degree back then it wasn't even funny. And there also was not nearly so much information on the Internet, though there tended to be a lot more net culture history around. Anybody else here remember the BERMs VS Nerds thing that was the hot debate topic for the longest time?
I remember the original incarnation of weird.com and of givememoney.com (now a squatters domain)
Send your Cash, Check, or Valuables to:
Some Homeless Guy New York New York. . .
*sigh*
Geocities used to be the somewhat lame but legit web host with domain names that where far to long. Crosswinds.net was the little known quality free hosting service. Tripod.com was the somewhat smaller competitor to Geocities.
And Gamespy used to be an APPLICATION not some huge multinational corporation. Hehehehe. Damn that is funny, looking at how far Gamespy has come, LOL! I never even really did like their product! Oh well, hehe. Hey Fragmaster, you rock!
Jeez, then the
But. . .
*sigh*
Same old web, just a ton more banner ads. But hey, now there is a banner ad size standardization group! Some days I think that is all the web ended up getting out of the
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Do you remember the first time you were ever in a chat room?
for me it was like suddenly a moment of transcendance when I first realized what the internet was capable of, and that I could actually directly talk to multiple people all over the world.
I remember emailing random people just because it was so cool and easy. (Now I'd be arrested for spamming...)
I wonder what our kids will think of it, having always had it...
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
No matter what the web looks like in 10 years, we will still have the same kind of problems as we have today with broken compatibility, blatant disregard of standards (90% makes web sites only for explorer), etc.
People do seem to forget that there were things before the www like gopher which you can still access today http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet /Gopher/?tc=1 is a good place to start.
:P
And away I used a 386 dx 25 with 4 MB of ram with two cups and a bit of string
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
There haven't been any innovations due to the monopoly that microsoft has. If microsoft had any serious competitor (by serious, I mean a substantial hold in the market share), we would most likely see a lot of innovations.
Competition = innovation.
No competition = not much changes in 10 years.
After thinking about it, the concept on disseminating information on the web via online textbooks for education is actually a difficult problem. How are textbooks different online versus a traditional book and how can they be best implemented to represent the data?
One of the oldest online textbooks, Webvision has attempted to do this, but there are significant problems. (Disclaimer: there is lots of very old html on the Webvision site and it needs a complete redesign with less gaudy graphics. I've been asked to take over it for the future and am now working on updating it in addition to finishing up my dissertation.)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. It's a little (OK, a lot) further out than 10 years, but an excellent picture of a truly interconnected wireless society.
I want my whuffie!
.Information doesn't want to be anything
>NCSA Mosaic was first released ten years ago today
To Tim Berners-Lee: After ten years, don't you sometimes wish you'd taken the blue pill? :)
Scary that theres still alot of web pages out there that look like they're NSCA Mosaic compliant
Just the other day I saw a site with a "Netscape 2.0 NOW!" graphic on it..
Damnit.. I wanna see Archie back.. I wanna see a Yahoo thats updated by hand and no database dagnabit!!
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
My prediction: Once we have much more bandwidth, the "infrastructure" for more fluid content will be in place. The "Web" of the future will bring together the free-for-all of P2P, realtime multimedia and portable devices. Although media pundits have been preaching "convergence" since the early 90s, they have it all wrong. Convergence is not something that is ever likely to happen since there is always going to be a new form of media/communication to add to the mix. Right now we have:
-Text (HTML, XML, etc...)
-Audio (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Realmedia, Cellular telephony, IP telephony etc...)
-Video (MPEG4, Ogg Theora/Tarkin, WMV, Realvideo, Sattelite, Broadcast and HDTV, etc...)
-Executable (Java, ActiveX, etc...)
That's a limited sample anyway. There is no telling what new forms will arrive on the scene that vastly change the way we experience media. MP3s are a perfect example. 1992... nothing, 1993... nothing, 1994... MP3, 1995... MP3 picks up more followers, 2003... MP3 players can be purchased at WalMart. That all happened in less than a 10 year period. (I realize the research behind MP3 probably started well before then, but who knows what's in the labs right now...)
So beyond the obvious:
-massive increase in bandwidth
-portable devices
-pervasive wireless networking
-expanded P2P/Web
I would suggest: ;P )
-completely embedded systems in nearly every facet of society
-more fluid devices (can be pressed into service to do something outside of the realm they were designed for)
-integration into biological systems (Anyone see an RFC for EtherTelepathy in the future?
-everything is the network...
--For my comments on the new difficulties in first posting and the "broken-ness" of metamoderation, go here:
http://slashdot.org/~Trolling4Dollars/journal/2699 5
Un-news
Al Gore created that too, right?
They're out of a job because of this new-fangled "graphical" stuff. Too bad they didn't patent the idea of displaying a representation of naked women on the internet for the purpose of facilitating masturbation.
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
Censored. Looked at commercial TV recently? 15 minutes of adverts in an hour show. Why? To finance the infrastructure. Looked at the profit margins of broadband providers recently? Not healthy. Servers require orders of magnitude more bandwidth than client to avoid being saturated, and this will also cost money. This money will come from commercial services. WWW2013 will be mainly adverts, and all actual content will be quantum-encrypted so that it can only be viewed through the eyes of a subscriber with a registered implant.
No, I don't think this will really happen, but it's worth thinking about.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So, technically, it's the 10th anniversary of the 10th (theoretically, anyhow) release. Woo!
From a month earlier, Andreessen posts to USENET:
The post at dejavu.org...
--- http://foo.ca
WeuWeuWeu,
just baby-spell it/
- so it's 'chtitip, weuwuewue, slashdot *clap* org
- WoTeeeFFee?
Microsoft has left IE virtually unchanged for quite a while, because they don't need put any effort into it anymore. They have a 70-80% market share that isn't going anywhere quickly so why bother?
IE does not has not moved an inch standards wise since IE 4, so "new" things like XHTML are not supported and only work because IE will support virtually any markup. Just try using a correct XHTML MIME type, or using XHTML DOM (which is read-only in XHTML) or CSS (changes to case rules in XHTML) in IE and it will fail. Mozilla and Opera (and no doubt Konq also) do all the above just fine.
Maybe they will do tabbed browsing to stop people saying it is behind for features, maybe they will gruddingly to pop-up blockers, or maybe they will just keep the ad revenue from MSN.
Until MS update IE the web stays looking just as it does now for 70-80% of users, however innovative the rest of the world gets.
DWR is Ajax for Java
I remember using the net at the time and
just thinking how cool gopher was. I had the
ability to find information!
It was also interesting to see the early
attempts at graphical interaction that the
BBS's packages tried to offer.
...at dejavu.org. They've got seven to choose from. Pretty cool.
Man I remeber in 1994 I installed FreeBSD 2.0.5 compiled X and ran Mosaic for the first time. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen. Two weeks ago I compiled it again and ran it. What a piece of crap. Nostalgic, yes. Crap, yes. It brought a tear to my eye and I dumped it.
The biggest effect of Mosaic on my brain was the gratitude I felt because we no longer needed to decipher cryptic fnames that showed up in archie and gopher, then DL a file for an hour and discover it was the wrong one.
Hey, try sending files back and forth at 300 baud where you can read ACK and NACK for packets and GUI means watching the dots show up on your screen as the file gets DL'd. Now I just laugh as I remember the amount of work that it took to get anything done.{Takes another swig of Geritol) "Yep, I was hip once..."
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
By 2013, I *hope* we will do away with browsers. Literally.
My thought is, the conventional web browser will eventually be replaced by something I like to refer to as a "metabrowser"... In other words, we don't really actively *surf* anymore, but rather, we swim through a series of content-rich pages generated by the browser itself, based on information transparently gathered from actual sources behind the scenes, and appearing in a format that I like to see things in. I don't want to see something prepared in a format someone else likes. I want to see it how I like it.
How is this going to be accomplished? Well, take Google as a crude engine model. For any particular subject you search for on Google, the top 5 or so pages that Google suggests to you carry (on average) about 40% of the total information payload you're looking for. The sort of searches you embark on have usually been done by hundreds of people before you. If there was a way to earmark at-a-glance how useful a particular piece of information is, then you could begin ranking specific *reigons* of content, not simply the pages themselves. Think of a browser with a highlighter pen. Wherever you go, you can use the highlighter pen to say "this is useful, the rest is crap", and that annotation (as well as the aggregate of other peoples annotations) are stored along with the document. When viewed from this perspective, irrelevant information falls into obscurity while important information rises to the top.
A metabrowser's task is to compile only that *useful* information, based on those annotations made by others in the past, combined with your own preferences. Think of it as a P2P utility for search parameters. What worked for you is shared amongst thousands of other people. Its not so much the page itself anymore, but what hotspots of that page are useful. Web browsers in 2003 are just machines for extracting the ore out of a mine. I want a device that extracts ore, refines it, and poops out a gold brick within 10 seconds.
I also see the possibility of "temporal browsing", i.e. you can see what Slashdot looks like today, yesterday, or back on February 19th '06 if you want. Why not? So much data just spills into oblivion for no reason, why not find a way to keep it around? Why not store webpage content the same way frames of a movie are stored, simply as a delta of the last keyframe?
I want to be able to "drill down" in a webpage to find the origin of a particular piece of information. I don't want to take 31337 h4x0r b0y's word for it.
Massive amounts of content are meaningless without a proper way of indexing it all. We need to build bindings. Everywhere.
Bowie J. Poag
I was just getting a handle on email, Usenet newsgroups, FTP and that newfangle Gopher thing when Mosaic came along. I didn't think it had much of a future, personally. There was no way the upstart would ever overshadow existing internet communities and their information-rich tools, just because it could (very slowly) bring us perty pictures.
I was wrong.
I'm tempted to predict that the web of 2013 will be completely owned or controlled by no more than three giant corporations. But I think the impulse to make oneself heard is a powerful one, and the web will continue to be the most significant outlet for that impulse.
Thanks to advances in multimedia technology, the web of 2013 will resemble the original dream for cable TV. There will be a billion channels. And there STILL won't be anything worth watching.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Like many other posters I saw this very early on in the game at an industry show in Tokyo.
If only I'd had the business savvy to invest in what I knew was going to be absolutely world-changing I would be very, very rich now.
But, alas, I'm a academic geek and never took any business courses in university. (Too busy with the astrophysics). Things are probably different these days as it's now all about the money.
To all the math, chem, physics etc. students out there, I give only this advice: TAKE AT LEAST ONE BUSINESS COURSE!!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
You don't need Geeksintraining if you're on Slashdot.
I never really liked Mosaic. Cello was better.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
I thought Mosaic came out in 1989?
2003-1989=close to 13 years +/-
...called WorldWideWeb written by Tim Berners-Lee.
The first version was completed on Xmas day 1990.
That makes the WWW twelve now and thirteen on Xmas day this year.
I suspect we will see a return to the compuserve/aol style "internet" where you can pay to be connected (and tracked) on a controlled network (where MS will attempt to ensure that every e-store is inaccessible unless you are on their trusted network and hence they get a slice). The question will be if MS will manage to prevent anyone operating an e-store that can work with their clients off this network, or if the network stack etc. will prevent any form of security which isn't theirs (not trusted). Don't forget that IE only really started to take hold about 5 years ago (IE4 released 30 Sep 1997) and dominence was achieved a year or two later so they have been holding the cards for quite a short time. As soon as they get "everyone" over to XP or later you can expect to see a lot more muscle flexing unless some government(s) actually start to really curtail them.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered World Wide Web community when IDC confirmed that World Wide Web market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that The World Wide Web has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The World Wide Web is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict The World Wide Web future. The hand writing is on the wall: The World Wide Web faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for The World Wide Web because The World Wide Web is dying. Things are looking very bad for The World Wide Web. As many of us are already aware, The World Wide Web continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Internet Explorer is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time IE developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Internet Explorer is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft leader Bill states that there are 7000 users of Internet Explorer. How many users of Opera are there? Let's see. The number of Internet Explorer versus Opera posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Opera users. Mozilla posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Opera posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Netscape. A recent article put Internet Explorer at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Internet Explorer users. This is consistent with the number of Internet Explorer Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Microsoft, abysmal sales and so on, Internet Explorer went out of business and was taken over by SGI who sell another troubled OS. Now SGI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that The World Wide Web has steadily declined in market share. The World Wide Web is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If The World Wide Web is to survive at all it will be among Internet dilettante dbblers. The World Wide Web continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, The World Wide Web is dead.
Fact: The World Wide Web is dying
It's also available directly from the NCSA (link is to ftp root dir; check out both Mosaic and PC subdirectories - telnet and ftp clients for DOS!), although that archive starts with v0.6.
That's the same characteristic that many truly brilliant innovations have. Cognoscenti can see some of the prehistory, but still, someone got all the important stuff right, all together, all at once--and everything after that is incrementalism.
Some other examples: look at Visicalc. All the important ideas were already there. (Well, OK, a few more of them fell into place with Context MBA...)
Or, for that matter, the graphic user interface as it existed in the 1984 Mac.
Or, how about adventure games? Not to knock, say, Myst, but Crowther and Woods' original Colossal Cave really gave us an excellent, totally complete, well-implemented example of the genre right out of the starting gate.
Donning my asbesto suit, I think Microsoft Word falls in the same category. The sad part is that this product has not only not improved, in many ways it has slightly deteriorated... Microsoft has not been a good steward of its own innovation.
All of these examples make me realize just how LONG it's really been since I've experienced the "Wow!" of new possibilities opening up in front of me...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I bet that some form of e-cash will turn out to have major effects in the long run. Waiting for critical mass . . .
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
Does anyone remember doing something like this:
In the days of Windows 3.11, there were a couple of programs that let you use lynx as your viewer, but would take the results and display them in a Mosaic/Netscape like program?
As I recall, these programs had a simple terminal app that allowed you to connect to your shell account. You then used the browser, which issued commands to lynx, and it grabbed the html and displayed the results.
Obviosly this was intended to be used over a non-ppp dialup. The joys of GUI browsing at 14.4 with only a shell account.
Who is Eric Bina, and why doesn't anyone remember him?
Oh wait, X-Files wasn't real???
"I see no reason why cheap broadband isn't too far in the future as well. "
One word: Greed.
"what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?"
:-P
Is this a fark.com photoshop? I thought I was on slashdot...
I remember when this came out. It was sweet. Except at the company I worked for there were no proxies set up to access the internet yet. But me and a buddy figured out where they were when they *did* set one up, and we were the only people in our department of 200 people that could surf the net. It really felt like we were getting away with something back then, so we had to keep our access secret. Man, I am really glad that I got to experience it when it was so young.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I love talking about the old computers we used to use. I get to brag about my good old 300 baud modem on my commodore 64/128. Loved trying to hit BBSs with that thing. I think it was about 1988 when I got it. Then I saved up and got a 386SX 25 with 1mb ram (I think) and a HUGE 52MB HD. 1200 baud was so fast!!!
I am sure some old fogie has me beat big time, but I was only 11 for crying out loud!
this
Be afraid...
One look at the popularity of Kazaa, etc. and it seems clear that peer to peer is the near future.
I believe the Internet will continue to add interconnections much lower in the spanning tree. This extension will be driven by the needs and performance gains offered by shared: processing, storage, and file retrieval.
Perhaps the connectivity will be supplied by ad hoc private networks using: wireless radio, free-space laser communication, or something we haven't seen yet (10 years is a long time).
I'm thinking we'll have a New GNU Thing bringing us a cooperative, free, "open," network. Call it GNU-space. Just power up your node, connect to two or more peers, and start routing traffic and adding your own.
Get your apartment in a tall building now.
the world wide web will browse YOU!
****--- A fortune cookie once told me the meaning of life...so I ate it. ---****
I just downloaded Mosain for Windows v1.0 and guess what, it doesn't render the Mosain homepage properly. And yes I do now that this is to do with fairly extensive changes (in term of perventage use of features which wern't there before) to the HTML spec over the past years.
If you read a speed reading book, does it take you less time to read the second half?
We need a real GUI protocol that can be put on top of HTTP to avoid firewall paperwork. Ideally it would be thin-client-capable so that scripting was optional rather than a necessity to get typical GUI functionality. The best candidate draft specs include XWT and SCGUI (my pet draft).
Using HTML+DOM+JavaScript to make biz forms really sucks. It is like trying to scratch your back using pinchy ants. HTML+DOM+JS is optimized for e-brochures, not biz forms.
Despite what seems to me to be a very common need, there is little interest on the part of the big vendors to push for better form GUI protocols. Perhaps it would cut into proprietary sales they figure.
Table-ized A.I.
In 2 years it will be a big fuckin' advertisement,with pop-up windows and backdoors so the government can look at your pr0n,too.
After all, they do have gonads,too.You can't see 'em, but they are there,they're in
"stealth" mode, trust me i know.The little buggers will drop and screw you and you won't even know it until it's too late.
Internet History: It Took a Network of Individuals to Invent a Network of Networks
"Apparently when taking a bath, he (Archimedes) discovered the buoyancy principle and jumped up and ran through the streets naked shouting 'Eureka' which means - I have found it." (Russell, http://math.about.com/library/blbioarchimedes.htm)
Some discoveries might be the result of one well-prepared mind in the right place at the right time, but the Internet is not one of them. There are many misconceptions about who invented the Internet and many more about what the Internet actually is. Some think that Al Gore might have invented the Internet due to a statement he made during his ill-fated 2000 presidential election. Some say that Vannevar Bush invented the Internet in his paper "As We May Think". Though Tim Berners-Lee is credited with the invention of the World Wide Web, and Larry Roberts is considered the Father of the Internet, the technologies that make up the network of networks, or the Internet, were invented inductively, layer-by-layer, and over time by many different individuals.
The spectrum of technologies that make up the Internet is too broad for an individual to create on their sole intellect. The Internet is a network of networks connecting computers together using one method called TCP/IP. Each of the connected computers uses software to share information, access information, or both. The software that shares information is called a server. One of the many software programs available to access information is a browser. According to a University of California Berkley tutorial on finding information on the Internet, the writer admits, "The Internet itself does not contain information. It is a slight misstatement to say a document was found on the Internet." He goes on to say that information is not found on the Internet, but through the Internet. To say one person invented the entire network is like saying that one person invented automobiles. An appropriate response would be, which part, and of which automobile?
The underlying technology that makes the Internet possible is computer networking. Arthur Delcher, Ph.D. defines a network as "A number of computers connected together so they can exchange data," in the Waterfield?s Guide to Computer Terms (page 67). This technology has its earliest roots in the early 1960s when Paul Baran, who then worked for the Rand Corporation, first proposed the idea. He sought to prove that data could be split into blocks, and each block would then find the fastest way to its destination, and following that, the information blocks would re-unite. Donald Watts Davies then implemented the idea in 1967. He coined the term "packet switching," which describes the process Baran proposed. This process continues to drive computer networking today, and Davies? term is still used (McCloud 157). The ideas Baran and Davies worked with were not completely their own, however. They were greatly inspired by a paper by Vannevar Bush wrote in 1945.
In 1913, Vannevar Bush wrote his masters thesis. The thesis included an invention called the Profile Tracer. This invention made measuring distances over uneven ground possible. In 1919, he started work at MIT where he taught and researched until 1932, when he was appointed Dean of the Department of Electrical Engineering. There he worked on optical technologies and a machine for the rapid selection from banks of microfilm (Keep, http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0034.html). He went on to many other important positions, which included the president of the Carnegie Institute in 1939, and a special presidential appointment during World War II. He even invented an early analog computer.
Vannevar Bush has been called "the pivotal figure in hypertext research" (Keep, http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0034.html). In his 1945 paper "As We May Think," he envisioned a world in which all human knowledge might be available in a desk-like device he named a Memex (McCloud, 154). He described
1. We'll understand more about how to slice information for the size of the real estate it's displayed on. You'll be able to receive content on everything from your 61" wide-screen TV down to your wristwatch, and the sites you'll visit will know which is which.
2. More of our lives will be stored and recorded on computers, both at home and on the Web. How we sort this out will define how much privacy we have in the future. If we allow corporations or the government to give us an easy, convenient (or invisible) way of storing our preferences and historical files on their servers, we will sacrifice a significant amount of privacy. If we want privacy, we'll need to find a way (and a will) to store and protect our personal data on our personal computers and still have it accessable remotely for use.
3. We will be forced to have a "digital identity" to participate in the mainstream cyberworld in much the same way that you need a picture ID to buy beer. There will still be places that will allow anonymity, but commercial and other "official" transactions will increasingly require something like PKI based on common standards. Of course, dependency on this raises the spectre of identity theft (or erasure) at a level never seen to date, so we must ensure that we still have "human" ways of verifying who we are.
4. Either:
a. Microsoft will have taken over the Internet and are our bases will belong to them, or...
b. Microsoft will have been made obsolete by open standards and formats.
Pick one. I know my preference.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
[sinner@localhost sinner]$ telnet slashdot.org 80
Trying 66.35.250.150...
Connected to slashdot.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
do not read this line twice.
Look for mostly media conglomerate content (those who know will still be able to find the other stuff, but it might be outside the official DNS, or not even using HTTP + TCP/IP.) Broadband will finally start catching on, but only in the way we have cable -- 57 channels and nothing on. You can't have 1 billion different streaming high resolution video sources, ever. Not on wire and not in the radio spectrum. Not even with spreadspectrum tech. Look for people to be claiming the "next big thing" is around the corner that will revolutionize all this, but basically, you'll have AOL, with TimeWarner cable, and email. SPAM will be less of a problem, but only because it will be for less offensive stuff, ie. mainstream. Doritos and Pepsi ads will come in your email. They'll be talking about email circumventors like they talk about TiVo nowadays, or VCRs and Black Boxes in the eighties. There will be laws passed requiring minimum commercial watching time. Oh, and the government will be a shambles.
Isn't it interesting how, while the patent office is handing out exclusive rights to all sorts of obvious bits of standard practice, the truly revolutionary ideas in software are never patented?
The cake is a pie
Finally, I stepped up to the big time and got gopher. Boy, I had about a hundred gopher bookmarks. It was simply the coolest thing in the world, after Usenet. One day, Nathan having graduated, Michael took me into his office and showed me this thing called Mosaic. It was crashing on his beloved Windows 3.1 Gateway (one of the few PCs on campus not running DOS), but he insisted that Mosaic was very cool. Then he showed me this wickedly cool program called lynx. Instantly I knew that gopher was finished. I was frustrated that lynx couldn't read my gopher bookmarks. Eventually I decided to convert the gopher bookmarks to lynx bookmarks. I didn't know it at the time, but this is how I learned HTML, since HTML was the file format for lynx bookmarks.
A couple of local gurus had set up a local Internet coffee shop. It was too far to walk, but when I got a ride there one day, I was amazed. Sun workstations. Many of them. A fast net connection. And on the Sun workstations was Mosaic. That was it. Since then, it's like I never logged off the net.
I hated Netscape for a long time. I think it was because they were effectively a monopolist. Charging money for a web browser was really holding back the net. I took a detour into OS/2 for a while, but found that Web Explorer was quickly outpaced by that old fiend Netscape.
Got a job as a network admin. This dork at the office was telling me about "IE." Oh yeah, I remembered, that was Microsoft's Spyglass browser. Whatever. It sucked.
Years passed. Netscape stagnated. IE got better, and became the monopoly browser. I stuck with Netscape 4.x and when it came out 6.x. I had to use IE more and more. It was bad. Then I started doing some vounteer QA work for the Mozilla Project. Mozilla got a lot better, but I was just there watching, along for the ride, not contributing as much as I aspired to.
Now Opera has matured and the khtml browsers are decent. Things are good. The latest Mozilla release is the still best, though.
"This email brought to you by Ford. Have you flown a Ford lately?"
-- Leeeter than leet
Hopefully by 2013, a group of nerds will have created a new platform,
will have abandoned the existing network, and will have jumped onto the next-thing once the public
exploits it.
At the time, NCSA Telnet had been the Center's big contribution to the Internet and a huge one at that. In the mid-'80s before NCSA Telnet, no one had dreamed of using a PC or Mac to directly access resources (like supercomputers) on the 'Net... It just wasn't done. MIT's PC/IP came out about the same time but I don't think it saw nearly same distribution as NCSA Telnet in the early years... NCSA Telnet was the client almost everyone used on "little machines."
Now ten years later, how many folks know what NCSA Telnet was, let alone recall it's impact? Talk about differences in scale...
--zawada
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
Unless IE's market share decreases somehow. IE hasn't changed much since it got the bulk of the market.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
HTTP was originally developed between 1989-1991, but didn't take off until there was a useful browser which could display inline images.
Well, DUH. ASCII porn isn't NEARLY as cool as the full-color stuff.
--in my browser ten years from now? I want my choice of foxy babe talking head and voice to be my personal information guide. I talk to her, she goes and finds the data I want and I can either read it myself or she acts like a secretary of sorts, she reads the info to me, I can stop and interact, reply to a post or order something, etc, and I can give instructions for later use like a cronjob of sorts. maybe something like, "I'll want to see movie whatever this evening, go find me the best deal for download, automatically pay for it or get it free, que it up, around 9pm I'll be ready to watch it" "In the meantime, go to my site and check on my sales today, and if there any customer questions, answer them if you can, if you can't, redirect them to my priority inbox." Something like that. I can do my email or other communications with other people, using text or rich media. The browser (and my dreambabe guide) is integrated with other applications at my direction, and it's done via voice as well as keyboard or mouse, any or all of my choosing. The biggest trend I can see is really getting voice working, both ways. An Eliza type thing that really works. Typing and mousing around is getting old now, time to move on how humans communicate, and that is primarily voice. We talk, the other stuff is for archiving purposes more than anything else. And webpages are getting more dynamic, less static daily it seems. And the "web" is just a small subset mirror of "reality", even a pure e-commerce site that sells stuff still has a real warehouse someplace, real trucks deliver. Electronic news media is still just mirroring what's going on in the real world. We don't pass each other notes for all our communications, most of the time we only do that if voice isn't as avaialable or handy. We use text for time shifting and for archiving and for permanent records, but a lot of our communications doesn't require that, it can be sounds and visual images that are just used, then they can poof away except as memories.
If you look at how most humans learn,and how we continue as adults to communicate, starting as children, voice and body language is what is learned first, reading comes later. We need to be able to talk to the boxes, the boxes talk to each other, and web browsers will be that deal that links it all together. The work and play we do will be controlled by our voices, like it is now.
My guesses?
The ability to control the look & feel of a site regardless of the browser window size, using image 'mip-mapping', vector graphics, and various layout schemes. Plus the ability for the user to enlarge or shrink the site as per their whim. Honest to god 3D rendering in broswer without plugins. Decent sound events. Java applets will actually load fast enough to be usable as an interface technology.
But that's content. As far as the browser? If you asked me last year, I would have said it would be the same, except for tagging along with whatever GUI changes have happened in Mac and PC interfaces. But with the latest push by Mozilla and other projects, who knows? I'd like to see my browser be more intelligent. I'd like to see it scour news sites and show me stories *I* want to see without me having to look for them. I'd like to be able to see some voice controls.
But, who knows?
As a big fan of lynx (my first ISP years ago, and the only one available to me for many months, was a dialup shell account), I'll plug the links browser here, which is a fine text-based browser that supports tables, so it can make sense of lots of pages that are unusable in lynx, and it has a somewhat friendlier interface to boot.
Ummmmm,
Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented that whole html-www thing created a graphical web browser that supported all the features of html (including inlined images) as the standard was developed. It ran on NeXT computers. Go look at the w3.org site for more.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
This is the 10th year birthday of the web using a decent tool-- but it is also Einstien's birthday (14 March, 1879), google has a cool einstien image.
Is that a cool coincidence or what? Must be something special about March 14th.
Here's an interesting site of other events that happened today in history. Among them I found the following interesting:
TODAY IS ALSO THE RIAA's BIRTHDAY!! HOW SCARRY!!
1958 RIAA (Recording Industry Association of American)is created and certifies 1st gold record (Perry Como's Catch A Falling Star)
1950 FBI's "10 Most Wanted Fugitives" program begins
1967 JFK's body moved from temporary grave to a permanent memorial
1971 The Rolling Stones leave England for France to escape taxes
1995 1st time 13 people in space
1997 President Clinton trips & tears up his knee requiring surgery
the funniest post I've seen all week. It deserves some upward modding.
The first time I saw Mosaic was in 1994, in a University lab with a direct connection to the Internet, and I thought it was pretty damn cool. I was amazed at the speed with which the images were downloaded and displayed. Not much later, I saw it run over a dialup line, and I saw how much slower it was, and the first thing I thought was the graphical web browser will kill dialup networking. From now on, its broadband or nothing!.
where there's fish, there's cats
It could grow in width, reaching everywhere with appliances, internet enabled dispositives, ipv6 addresses even for your pencil, all enabled to access by voice, touch(for screens and things like that) and maybe more. I don't think that in 10 year we'll have holographic screens for clocks, a la Final Fantasy or Spy Kids 2, but is a nice goal.
It could grow in depth. Have a big amount of content, but is still far from having "everything" know by man, in every language, in every media.
And it could grow mature in other ways, being more self consistent, more consolidated. I think that will not be so far something that give a consolidated view of the web, something like data warehousing do for complex databases, but for the more complex database of all.
Directories like yahoo did a first step, so the same did the first search engines. Google advanced a bit more, consilidating a bit the web giving weight to more linked things. But there still a lot of work to do in that direction, something that answer my mostly free form questions not giving me a collection of links that could talk about what I'm searching for, but an answer, something really like the old oracle, but for now and mostly for real.
The last part is what I see more probable for the next years, still a lot needs to be developed, but there is a more or less clear path to reach it, search engines already have a big chunk of the www to start, and some legislation maybe will be needed (extractind data from web pages for that of things will be very similar to screen scraping).
Of course, all of this could happen if nothing avoid this, like war, global economic problems, patents and IP in general don't put obstacles, famine, diseases, extintion levels events or Microsoft.
The english language is not static. It can, will and some would say, MUST change based on usage. Language is meant to communicate quickly and clearly. When a certain letter 'double you' is said outloud over and over, it will get abreviated.
The real question is wether the prounciation of the letter will change in common usage. As noted elsewhere, 'w' is the only 3 syllable letter in the english language, all others are single syllable. In fact all other letters are pronounced as vowel-consonent or consonent-vowel. Since 'you' is already a letter, and w's now look more like double v's than double u's, my guess is that 'dub' and eventually 'duh' will replace 'double you' in the long term. The advent of the 9 syllable 3 letter acronym as a catalyst for this change in pronunciation can bee seen already.
So my prediction for 10 years from now? The whole world changes to a environmentalist green paradise with no machines or computers or internet. The only lasting remains? The pronunciation of the letter 'w' in the english language has changed to 'duh'. This is to remind us all how stupid the dot-com boom was.
Yeah, I was waiting for someone to make this point. NCSA Mosaic was not the first web browser. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser, called "WWW," for NeXTSTEP.
And then some bozo invented Flash and irrevocably ruined the internet for all of eternity.
10 seconds! Make it 3 and you've got a deal.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
... by 2013 the notion of network and computer will no longer be independant. Computers will be part of a symbiotic network evolved out of current p2p and distributed processing ideas. Software will not be confined to individual PCs, but will be run on the network with application components transparently moving between nodes to accomodate traffic and load. We will no longer be able to control a personal computer like a owned product, computing will be a service offered to us as is, like television. Searching google will come at the price of helping to index the whole mess, etc.
The advertising will make times square look subtle. The killer apps will still be pr0n.
I miss BBSs and 2400 baud dialouts.
I still remember the very first time I saw Mosaic: I was at a computer lab and a friend just told me about this "cool" thing that just came out. Needless to say, me being a geek and all, it took me only 5 minutes later to create my first web page (back then, HTML was *ultra* simple). I also vividly remember saying to my friend "this is the future of the Internet".
I actually remember that at one point it was possible to view *ALL* the websites on the planet (tell that to the younger generation today!), and how every single day was very exciting to discover new things (the birth of yahoo, altavista, ebay, and amazon come to mind).
That day I saw mosaic is on my list of days I could never forget, like the challenger explossion, the berlin wall coming down, the wall trade center attacks, and recently the columbia tragedy...
holy crap you youngins with your 14.4 or even 2800 baud modems!
try 300bps Kiddo.
I was on Arpanet in 1985 via a MSU connection I was borrowing.
I still want to know why this damned HTTPD and www crap took off.
...but i'm sure it will be owned by Microsoft.
So, all you folks who think you have a real handle on technological progress: what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?
With any luck it'll be a vast desert. People may discover that one can:
Go to a big building and see/touch/evaluate a product LIVE!
Hit on the pretty teller at the bank.
Go out and talk to people without seeing faces that change only once every three or four seconds, and who don't ROFLTEO, because they ANAL.
Buy porn off the shelf in a convenient, easy-to-port-to-the-bathroom package.
Read consumer equipment reviews in a (get this) PAPER format obtainable at your local bookstore.
Illegally trading their music by meeting people who have a similar interest in music and who don't introduce themselves as jmh121jasi@hotmail.com.
Pay their bills in person and get a little exercise in the process.
Read a book, watch a movie, learn to play a musical instrument, watch a sunset (in a realtime, full 3D, completely immersive format no less!), or... go on a date.
Yes, my finest hope for man is that we discover by 2013 that a computer is not needed to access the vast majority of useful information and experiences available!
I remember thinking that the world wide web was a fad that would die out, because gopher looked so much better in a terminal and links between sites were better organized. This was of course before people started having SLIP and PPP connections with insanely fast modems coupled with graphical browsers that made it possible for www to grow into something more.
And before you get all "OOOooo, that's not what happened", you don't know, because you weren't there.
People will acess the web by standing in front of really large flat screens and waving their arms around. The NIH will mandate the use of browsers that require the user to know Tai Chi as part of a campaign against obessity.
We'll be using the "outernet"..
massively meshed wireless connections running a bonzi version of BGP.. which bypass the phone companies entirely.
sure they tried to prevent this from happening but the hacker community told em to blow it up their collective asses.. porn and casino gambling is king although "government terrorism" keeps tryin to shut it down.
MS just released netbeui over OWP (outernet wireless protocol) to make sharing you photo collections easier.. minor side effect is your web enabled biometric pacemaker is now open to attack from anyone.
*shrug*
it could happen.
--a large part of the infrastructure costs are directly blameable by the archaic notion that humans have to be in a centralised location in order to trade and do commerce. the major over priced locations that most of the content comes from are horribly over priced and based on , well, where oxen trails crossed or where port cities got established. the living costs in those areas are insane, as are the monopolies in 'broadcast' that arose around them, thereby driving up costs. it's artificial and doesn't need to happen. Look at salon and their economic problems, not necessary, they blew most of their money on location (not needed) and over paying for content, because their content providers demand too high a price because most of them choose to live where it's artificially expensive, ie, those old oxen trail crosing or port cities. It's ridiculous. The web is allowing people to actually move out of cities if they want to and are smart, major urban areas need to shrink in size and go back to being cheaper, they should be inhabited by people who have an actual NEED to be there, not an artificialality need brought about by historical inertia as much as anything else. We don't NEED our news to be coordinated around Dc and NYC. We don't NEED our entertainments to be coordinated around "hollywood". Not near as much anyway. Amd we sure don't NEED there to be an over paid "class" of monopolists, this pricing structure for any number of things, including bandwith, is driven by monopolies and artidfical scarcities and bogus "laws" that are primarily breaks given to those bribery based lobbying efforts that have the deepest pockets. It's not all that, but I would contend it's a large part of it.
Example, ww1, correspondent on the front lines, gets to some telegraph, sends in the news, got almost a complete lock on the info, it can be expensive and slow to propagate, plus be politically manipulated. Fast forward ww2. More, telephone voice used with transcription at the other end, faster, less monopolistic, more correspondents. Fast forward vietnam, slight delay video avaialble right in peoples living rooms. more correspondents possible. Fast forward desert storm one, real time as it's happening news. More correspondents, the tech existed then for thousands if that was what was wanted.
Now, anyone can be a news person, get published, real time,we can and now DO have millions of people reporting, I haunt forums, I get "news" all the time that isn't on drudge or cnn. The "need" for monopolies and for great expense has dropped to almost nil. It's becoming irrelevant to have a peter jennings telling me what's going on when I can just real time chat or video with someone actually living where that news is ahppening. We don't need to keep paying those salaries and for that infrastructure, we can skip the entire profit middleman if we choose to, it's just slow adopting, but we CAN do that now. A lot of us already do that, we own and use forums, wikis, chatrooms,blogs etc.
Costs will drop eventually as we de centralise more and more people are able to get out of first gear with their computers and use the rest of the transmission. and it will really drop when we drop the need to have middleman do our reporting for us, middlemen and their corps and buildings and huge salaries. then we won't need those adverts, either, can start to cut that bloated industry down, yet another waste of cash and we certainly don't need more sophisiticated brainwashing developed and deployed, which is what most advertising is. It ain't needed and I can come up with my own "opinion" and if I need a product all i want is a price, what it does, and look at some reviews, i don't need to be brainwashed into getting it.. I can share my "news" I get personally with people all over the planet, we all share, cut the middlemen out, not needed. THAT is one place some savings can come from, BIG BIG savings. Let's get rid of those bloated buggywhip jobs and industries, they made their TRILLIONS already,last century, cool, move forward, time to move on
Given the WWW is 10 years old, the web is actually exploding. Compare this to the growth of a human being. I feel like a boiling frog, in the sense we can't keep up with all the new things anymore.
And the 2013? That probably depends on those critical breakthroughs in nano-technology, which in turn give life to the real artificial intellingence.
But after all, logically, I don't think it will be technology that matters. Once we are able to buy feelings we like, things will change forever.
Here's what I think we're going to be seeing in 2013:
Computers: there will still be general purpose computers, because people love them and aren't anywhere near ready to give them up without a knock-down, drag-out fight. But I think the main part of the computer will be extremely compact, and the rest will be very graceful. Right now, several companies are perfecting flexible, foldable LCD screens which will be absolutely everywhere within ten years. So I see desktop machines evolving into a very small, detachable box which can be set into a cradle, with some kind of connection to a large flexible LCD sheet stretched out in some way over a desk. Some of these screens will be very large, I think, because people will want to be able to watch movies on them and companies will pursue that.
Laptops: I think there will always be laptops, because their form factor is so convenient. But they'll be very thin and durable, and will use a modified form of the flexible LCD screen as a display. They might look like a 6-inch by 10-inch wafer, with a frame that can snap open and position a flexible LCD for use. We'll still use keyboards, because keyboards work really well. But they'll be very thin (although the width won't change; human hands are not going to shrink anytime soon).
Hard disks: dead. Gone. I see everything going solid state, with no moving parts. Instead of a hard disk, you'll have the descendants of today's Flash cards.
Combine this with the flexible LCD and you've got a laptop which can survive being thrown like a frisbee. Durable laptops started out as a military technology, with hard drives being shock mounted and LCDs being armored. Now, even the iBook has a shock-mounted hard drive. By 2013, laptops will be pretty hard to break.
PDAs: Pdas and cell phones will converge, of course. It's already happening. Waterproof, shockproof models will emerge with GPS built in. Just about everyone is going to have one, and hardly anyone is going to use land-lines (they'll be considered weird, and quaint).
Everything will be designed to work with a network. Everything will be integrated. I think that most people won't have a separate television and audio system, because everything is going to end up converging into one large, multipurpose device. So you'll have your home system and probably a laptop to carry around, and a combination PDA/Cell phone in your pocket.
I'm kind of looking forward to it, personally. It should be a pretty exciting period to be alive.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Just to set the record straight, the first
graphical browser was Viola, not Mosaic.
--Lee Daniel Crocker : http://www.etceterology.com My life is in the public domain.
Should we send congratulations to Al Gore, too? He did invent the Internet, after all.
You call this a signature?
"http://www.example.com" is redundant. The "www." doesn't add any information. "http://example.com" ought to be sufficient. It's not that hard to include an A record for the origin of a zone in DNS.
..."
:)
Other redundancies:
user@mail.example.com
"I'd just like to say"
"At the end of the day, you've got to look at the bottom line and ask yourself
most of slashdot
heh heh
I know lots of people in Toronto who already say this. I think it got popular at the ad agencies.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Of course pronouncing each syllable is the origin of SlashDot itself.
Aich Tee Tee Pee Colon Slash Slash Slash Dot Dot Org
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
What the fuck does that even mean?
I would guess IPv6, but we might have to wait till 2020 for that.
In other words I have never needed/used the DVD-ROM ability of the drive. I would qualify that as a fad. Apparently you can buy some linux distributions on DVD-ROM as an option. That might be cool but it's not really any better than using the CD-ROM editions.
And yes, I realize how weird this sounds, but keep in mind how weird it would have sounded in 1993 that you would use something called the Internet to order pizza in 2003.
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
Sure, it's ten years since version 0.10. But this isn't the first browser. The change log talks about the previous version - 0.9 (which sounds like 0.09 to me) and it talks about some added features, but it already was ported to several flavors of Unix. It sounds as if it had achieved some maturity in a prior version. From 1989, we'd be at year 14, more or less.
-- Stephen.
Looks like you've already started to forget ;-)
Why is anything anything?
After reading through most of these comments, I can't help but notice the huge chunk of people who feel Lynx is the best browser ever and that Flash and whatnot aren't worthy of being used. Sure, we could just look at plain Jane HTML pages, but why? Maybe Lynx is great for you, but that doesn't mean I should be using it too.
If Lynx were so great, why are "Internet-enabled" cell phones (WAP?) such a complete market failure?
Anyways... would magazines be better if they were text-only? Would school textbooks convey information better without pictures?
We could've stuck with using black and white TV instead of color, and now this newfangled HDTV. But sometimes progression forward is not only necessary, but also serves to enhance the presentation of information.
People want to see animations and colors.* Plain text is boring.
I'm sure this'll get a reply or two that say Flash is web blasphemy, but so is a lot of the junk on (cable) TV. That doesn't mean that something good can't be found, like a documentary on the History channel, for example.
*Pop-ups don't count.
and people will still be trying to get FP on slashdot
Through some new internet-temporal-time-rift technology that proves the universe is in fact a donut, Slashdotters will be pre-first posting.. like, they will get those FPs up before the story is even posted.
At least, that was my response to seeing Mosaic back in '93. One of the secretaries installed it and showed it to me. Ahe liked it a lot, but I really didn't see the use since there was so little content.
Fast forward about 3 months, and I'd all but left my gopher client behind. In fact, it was later that summer that I figured the web address would replace the 800 number in advertising. Of course, nobody believed me back then. Now it's hard to imagine print or broadcast advertising with it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Ten years at ten hours a day- my how time flies! An exaggeration, but not that far off.
/hr),
....
With 36,500 hours, I could have
- made $365,000 (at $10
- raised two more kids,
- helped 3650 people with 10 hours of assistance
- played 7300 games of Quake
Charlotte 1.1 1992
:)
Browsing text from an IBM 3181 via an sna link since before computers could fit in one room
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I worked in NCSA's education group as an REU intern. One day they trucked us across the parking lot to see a demo of this newfangled thing. My thoughts?
:)
"So what? I can already get all that with ftp, gopher, veronica, etc."
Yes, that's really what I thought. I guess I wouldn't make much of a VC bird dog.
Liberty uber alles.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...let me connect through "TIA" (The Internet Adapter) to a SLIP connection using Trumpet Winsock and the winsock.dll files I downloaded from one of my favorite local boards.
all the web pages were grey, the few image files to be found were all GIFs (and all HUGE), and there were no such things as scrolling marquees, banner ads, popup windows, and "you must provide an e-mail address to log into this site"?
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
CowboyNeal smells like catfood.
In Soviet Russia, catfood smells like CowboyNeal.
Soviet Russia will surf you?
No, that's not right.
I'm thinking the answer is something like, "Porn, lots of Porn," as passe as that sounds. All media technology eventually leads to or comes from porn. That's the way it's always worked.
As far as what I'd personally like to see is topographical navigation of the web - just like you see in some hacker movies, where a guy is 'flying' down a tunnel in his monitor, and he's passing all these shapes and greek letters.
Let me elaborate. When I open my browser in 2013, I hope to be able to surf normally, like I can today. But that inhibits us a lot, if you think about it - how much data do we miss because of the inefficiency of search engines - even google's? What if the web went from some other protocol (other than HTTP) and used something more intelligent than HTML to write pages in? (or at least some sort of heirchial (like the DNS system) 'this site contains' markup). That would be ideal - a search engine could simply querry the nodes for what each node contains, and depending on whether the author wants the material to be seen or not, it would be sent. Future web servers could even automatically parse such information from a site (as in, what it contains), and then all web servers could report to upstream servers, making the web a much more useful tool.
Then we could truely use something like Yahoo!'s "Categories" to find data, and not simply google for stuff. Finding sufficient research papers to write further research papers (or simply for reading) is pretty difficult now. I'd like to think this would make it at least reasonably easier.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I am thinking we are near to an XML browser that allows transparent browsing of multidimensional data bases. You'll be able to organize the data graphically in diverse formats when it is numerical, perform elementary analysis of it, or download it and use downloadable software to access the data for more detailed analysis.
This is the holy grail for the web; to make access to arcane databases easy and transparent. Then everyone will soon transform their useful databases into this format...
ThosEM
It is my hope that the zillion and one add-ons for the browser are thrown out and that a graphical browser is built from the ground up which uses a Perl type of interpreter that has been extended to include graphics (2D & 3D) and which can compile the programs. This would allow the creation of a new JavaScript, Perl, PHP, et al programs who's underlying code is executable on all platforms.
Unlike Java, which uses a VM, this would run more like Borland's original Turbo Pascal. And yes, it would allow people to take advantage of a system's commands. However, instead of allowing the program to run amok - why not make all operations only execute on a sub-directory below where the browser itself resides or one which the user selects. This would restrict such things as "rm -rf *" from wiping out the entire system to only wiping out a particular directory. Further, each site's software could be restricted to work only (again) on one particular directory (like c:/http//...) instead of willie-nillie allow full access to the entire hard drive.
In any event, browsers were never originally intended to handle graphics. They were tacked on afterwards. They were never intended to execute programs (being meant more to just display static pages) - so that was tacked on afterwards also. In fact, everything is just tacked on to the browser. This means that a normal browser now has to handle hundreds of different things using tacked on add-ins rather than just being able to handle it in a more efficient method. That being compile the program and let it execute.
Also, as things have progressed things have become more complicated as more and more capabilities have been tacked onto the basic browser. I thought the whole idea of the browser and HTML was to make it easy for people to do things. Have you looked at the vector graphics stuff? Easy? I don't think so. It is getting to where you have to have a degree in web programming just to be able to do something simple.
And that is great - if that is what you wanted to do in the first place. But what was wanted was an easy way for mom and pop to set up web pages. Only - they almost can't now-a-days because it has gotten that complicated. And hey! I'm a programmer too and that means job security for me. But it makes me pause. For it always seems to be this way. We start out simple and then instead of keeping to the KISS principle - we instead seem to gain great pleasure from making it as hard as possible for someone to do anything with anything.
So what I'm saying is is that it is all good and fine for you to have an IQ of 1000 - but can you make it work for someone with an IQ of 100? or 50? Remember that kids don't have an IQ of 1000 either. You want them interested in programming? Then make it so they can use it first - and that means making it simple and easy to use and having a standardized base code to work from.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Mosiac was released on Albert Einsteins birthday, interesting.
You know there's a reason things don't start when you only click them once in Windows. It's made so if you accidentally click it, it won't start itself (sometimes this takes a while, making you wait 30sec or however long till you can close the programm and start using your computer again). Also, you have to click and drag to select a single item, which takes longer than simply clicking on something and having it selected. Also it's always a hasle if you click and drag and select something you don't want to, then you need to deselect them, and then start over. (Note: sometimes programs start even when you right-click them).
One last thing, you can have multiple destops on Windows with NVidia's nView display dirvers. Which you can switch with a keyboard combo of your choice.
...and going "wow".
Mind you, I hadn't seriously touched a computer since 1990, much less even owned one. However I was a big MacWorld reader and knew about every mainsteam computer topic. I had never even seen some Internet screens in real life, yet I still knew this was big news. 99% of my entire computer usage at that point was Mac based, so point and click computing was my starting point. Command line computing was so cumbersome to me, so I understood all the trouble in pre-Mosaic surfing. When the details of Mosaic came out, I knew then the Internet had caught up to Macintosh ease of use. It was almost on par with the first time I heard Yngwie Malmsteen (the guy who made me say "Eddie Van Who?") play on the first Alcatrazz album.
Still, it took my 4 more years (1997) before I even got on the Internet. I picked it up in 5 seconds.
You had it lucky. Where I was stationed, we didn't have any newfangled interactive terminals. We had to punch our URLs onto cards and mail them to headquarters
No joke, many years back, I worked for a company that had an Internet e-mail gateway, but no other Internet access, and I discovered a service that you could use: you email them an URL, and they email you back a copy of the web page.
Of course, "clicking" on a link was a non-trivial process with this sort of "browser", but I actually found it useful once or twice....
It almost sounds like you would rather use the Win 3.x "Program Manager" menu group system, rather than "Start" -> "Programs" -> "Vendor" -> "Random" -> "BogoEdit". I know I would.
I think the Windows 95 style desktop (etc) was a big botch, compared to Windows 3.x. Yes, Win32 suck much less than Win16 as an API / run-time environment, but the look is awful, and it is hard to explain.
"Hey, let's re-order the buttons at the top of the frame: minimize, maximize, kill." What kind of logical progression is that?
I used to be able to easily make program groups in win 3.x, and drag program icons wherever *I* wante d them. Nesting would have been nice, but I had a usable desktop with the stuff I used. Under 9x and its brethren, you can dump lots-o-stuff on the one-and-only-one disktop background, or those insane "start" menus. Moving things around in the menus requires some pretty arcane knowledge of magic files and/or hidden menus (I've had better things to do...)
Er, this is a bit off topic, isn't it?
When somethings works pretty well, carefully consider whether you should "revolutionize it". As we've seen, egomanics could probably screw up the web browser interface every bit as bad as the OS desktop... ("Has anyone seen my fvwm? Maybe it's underneath this gnome thing...")
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
I could be wrong... but I believe that yes, MS Word 1.0 had a pixel-based, as well as the monospace-char-based interface shown in the picture you reference, running under DOS.
It was an option--you had to select it, and you had to have the right graphics card--but I think it was there. I don't know how usable it was.
Microsoft was very slow in getting out a Windows version of Word, by the way. (Remember, Samna beat them by almost a year with Samna Ami?)
Your point about LisaWrite is well-taken, though.
(I am a certified Mac bigot, by the way--or at least I was until OS X came out. I'm a little sorry to confess that it did take a full month before I bought my first Mac in February 1984. Paying $3000 for it. With a teller's check. And had to wait an extra month for the ImageWriter _cable_.)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
that is wrong there was violla and even tin burns-lee's own NEXT browser.
MOSAIC was promoted as the 1st graphical browser but that is factually wrong. I wasnt even the first major browser. Mosaic came years after the WWW
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
It is actually a good thing that the interface hasn't changed drastically in the past 10 years. Users like stable interfaces. Also, this has allowed developers to focus on the applications.
We are coming to a point, though, that the amount of available information will be unbearable. We need a new model; a new interface will follow.
The semantic web may be a solution. Strange as it may seem, the shift to a semantic web may happen quickest within corporations and universities, to organize enterprise information. Only after its benefits are proven within enterprises, will the common web user see the change.
Information will be available in a whole new way. Searching will be very different. Who will be the next Netscape? The next Google?
Sheesh... you don't know about the worldwide trade in walls? Where have you been, under a rock?
Sure, evolt.org has old ones, but only for Windows... didn't you need Trumpet TCP/IP back then?
Didn't anyone browse the NCSA FTP directory? I found source code for version 1.2, the oldest I could get that has a chance of compiling in Linux... maybe I'll try it out on a Sun machine tomorrow...
Maybe someone else can try this out? I can't get it all to compile in Gentoo, even after hunting down few easy bugs...
Wouldn't it be cool to use xmosiac, rather than talk about how great things were back in the day? Where is ./'s retro sense gone?
evolution IS god.
makes me miss Mosaic even more.
Ehh screw these old bastards ;-) For me it was 1994, 486SX, 25MHz, 4MB RAM. Dialed into this new-fangled internet thing and i didn't know what i was doing, but i knew it was something cool. I can't tell you how many .tar.Z and .shar.Z files i downloaded hoping to get a great new program. Back in those days everyone online used UNIX, so when you went to the Mosaic search homepage and followed a link to "what's a good newsreader?" you ended up in ftp.sunsite.ac.uk or something with /pub/internet/news/trn.tar.Z Woo :-) Eventually got set up with WinVN and anon.penet.fi and it was all porn and warez for a few years, then Netscape started getting popular and the web actually got more interesting than webcams-pointed-at-fishbowls. People say the big internet revolution happened in 94/95, but i think it was much closer to 97/98 when IE4 and Netscape 4 came out... Programs that were actually easy to use and slick, and modems started getting faster than 28k8.
Everything will be more interactive. The "desktop" and the Internet will be much more integrated, and everything will be built more and more on convenience and less and less on user control. People like us will hate that, even if they do make things better, because we ultimately like having control. But name a technology that has evolved to allow the people greater control, and you'll name a real innovation.
The very first channel I ever joined was memorable.
Via a primitive browser I was able to determine that Mirc was a pretty popular software app and downloading and installing it was no big deal really.
Incidentally, most x86 people booted into DOS in those days. Windoze was so incredibly slow and crashprone that we tried to avoid running it excpet on momentary occasions when one of the handful of installed apps needed it.
Anyway, I launched my just-installed chat client for the first time and selected a channel, more or less at random as soon as I figured out
There were about 10 or so ppl online, but before I could even say hello, a massive netsplit hit and left me in the channel alone.
I'm afraid in my confusion and inexperience I couldn't help thinking I'd inadvertantly stumbled across a clique of obnoxious snobs
I calmed down and stayed with it, and eventually managed a level of comprehension that made it possible to understand what the hell really happened.
Netsplits are still with us, unfortunately, and when they hit I'm reminded of that incident occasionally, and chuckle, which is helpful in that context.
give me a
> the monospace-char-based interface shown in the picture you reference, running under DOS
:-)
you know, now that I am looking at that picture again, I wonder whether that wasn't pixel-based too (CGA or Hercules?). Or were italicized characters available in character mode? I was still using 8-bit machines at that time, so I did not have the thrill of using char-based interfaces on PC since I jumped straight to an Atari ST (a Mac was way above my budget back then...
Speaking of the Atari ST, it was not until 1986 when I could try the native version of MS Write on it, of all things (no MS Word there)!
Sadly, I could not afford a Mac until the Plus dropped to affordable levels on the educational pricelist... and the Atari ST had a mighty 640x400 resolution
With XHTML, CSS is crucial to creating even simple pages. Under XHTML CSS allows for very cool things such as defining multiple style sheets for each page for different purposes - you can now have a page which'll look perfect when seen on screen, printed and on a mobile device without having to detect the user agent or viewing situation.
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
Don't forget frames. That's what really got the web going. Imagine, what would the web be like without frames?
I never thought that I'd see the say where Netscape is free software and
X11 is proprietary. We live in interesting times.
-- Matt Kimball
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