Slashdot Mirror
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
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....
because subscribers can read the stories before anyone else.
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
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...
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
By the way things are going the internet will probably be 80% porn movies and pics, and 19% 3d porn.
Anybody else see "fad" technologies out there now? Anybody have a guess as to which ones will stick?
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.
Er, you mean , right?
Doesn't work in IE, works in Moz though...
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
We'll still be using the web to find out the release date for "Duke Nukem Forever".
Gimme karma, bitches.
Game... blouses.
There's a story behind that. As far as I recall without the help of Google...
1) Mosaic was originally free software.
2) A company (Mosaic Spyglass?) was formed to make it into a commercial product.
3) Microsoft, desperate for a browser, licensed Mosaic from that company, on terms that required a certain percentage of the amount made by Microsoft from each browser sale.
4) Microsoft then turned around and gave away the browser, Mosaic's lawyers all slapped their foreheads in collective shock, and Mosaic Spyglass never saw a red cent from the Borg.
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 first browser was called WorldWideWeb, more info where. His first release was in Christmas 1990. So, the World Wide Web is 12 years old.
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.
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.
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?
It's still mostly devoid of content :-)
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.
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
...at dejavu.org. They've got seven to choose from. Pretty cool.
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
On the plus side this means more first post that have substance to them..
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!
Who is Eric Bina, and why doesn't anyone remember him?
this
Be afraid...
the world wide web will browse YOU!
****--- A fortune cookie once told me the meaning of life...so I ate it. ---****
Taking the business courses doesn't necessarily help. I worked for DOE from '89 - '91, and so actually remember the fractured world of the net (BITNET, HEPNET, NSFNET, etc.). I started in b-school in '91 and enjoyed the burgeoning community on the net.
The culture on the net (including the various lists in which I participated) was so strongly counter to the use of the net for business (e.g., people on the Pink Floyd discussion list got flamed for selling things like used albums and paraphernalia to each other) that as the web evolved, it never even occured to me what a scarce resource something like "Drugstore.com" might be. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, of course, I kick myself for not realizing that and purchasing every bloody generic domain name I could get my hands (and my meager, graduate student finances) on.
So, the question is, in 10 years what will I be kicking myself for not recognizing now? Damn, I wish I knew.
John
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
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.
"This email brought to you by Ford. Have you flown a Ford lately?"
-- Leeeter than leet
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!
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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