Slashdot Mirror
Ten Years of Web Browsing
AnamanFan writes "Today in 1993, a group of students at the University of Illinois released a little program called Mosaic. News.com.com.com has a special four-part series on the anniversary. I for one will celebrate by spending extra time with Mozilla and Camino." Slashdot marked the anniversary a little while ago.
I had actually used the CERN line-mode www interface before Mosaic came out, just to check out the ravings of this pompous Brit I heard about (by the name of Tim Berners-Lee) who was raving that this thing called the World Wide Web was intended to contain the sum of all human knowlege. But Mosaic was a huge leap forward.
However, when Mosaic first came out, a lot of folks in my department were using it as a better interface to Gopher, since in 1993 there was far more interesting stuff available via Gopher than via HTTP. Of course that didn't last long.
Yeah, this web thing is a nice idea, but it'll never go anywhere without any content.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
No, we haven't, because there really wasn't any infrastructure for on-line applications before the web. Sure there were a handful of standard protocols like ftp and telnet, plus the ability to have remote X sessions, but there wasn't really anything beyond that. At least today it's possible to have an on-line application that has some prayer of working. The web is piss poor compared to what you could do with a really well designed on-line applications protocol, but it's a fair sight better than having to roll your own system any time you want to accomplish anything.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Well, Apple users still have it, IE vs Safari vs Camino. And as a result, browsers are fast, have popup blockers, download managers and tabbed browsing and about anything users ask for. Anyone who thinks they might sell stuff to Mac users designs their website properly. Just think about how much more lean and stable windows browsers would be if MS didn't kill off serious competition. Typing this in Safari.
This makes me amazed at the speed with which information now travels. I remember trying to get on the net in high school back in 94. Nobody I knew, knew anything about it and there were no easy to install IP stacks for Win 3.1. I remember trying to decipher the articles in Boardwatch magazine and hunting the local BBS's for info.
It took me forever to finally get on (a Prodigy account) and then that was text. I used that to get info for my first Linux install and finally after switching to Netcom and getting X working, I was surfing the web with Netscape. What a pain.
I had no idea how to do this stuff and finding the info was extremely painful. It was like a bunch of secrets that took forever to find. The only person I talked to at the time that knew about Mosaic or anything was some random clerk in an OfficeDepot.
Today, we know the instant anything is released, we get the inner workings of expert groups. I know I take all this stuff for granted today, but it is still completely amazing how things have changed.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
You had the big name commercial sites back then of course (e.g. Microsoft), but even sites like Yahoo! felt like they were made by a bunch of fanatical semi-professionals, as opposed to some big corporation with big buildings and big salaries.
People used phrases like "home page", "surf the net" and "send me e-mail", and they all take me back to a time when the Web was more innocent, before every company, shop, charity or celebrity had their own "web-presence". The Web felt less tainted by greed. Now the feeling I get from the Web is a lot more like that I get in a shopping mall, where I'm constantly having to question people's motives and the veracity of information I'm getting. In '96 you knew with 95% certainty that the Michael Jackson fansite you were checking out was put together by a dedicated fan with all the pedantry and attention-to-detail that goes with it, so you tended to trust what you were reading a bit more.
Ok, I'm not saying that the Web was good then, and it's nothing but evil now. I'm not saying that the fantastic, informative, enjoyable, insightful sites are not there - just that they're a bit harder to find. I'm not saying that the Web is no longer a tool for free-speech and free-thinking, because as long as the standards that define the Web remain public, open and [relatively] anonymous we will still have this amazing playground for the groupmind.
Right, I'd better go, my pizza's rapidly cooling.
I was a student at UIUC at the time when Mosaic was developed, and I remember using it in the Sun and HP EWS labs. (Mosaic was installed and maintaned by students, in the lab-wide /scratch directory, for a while). I started using it right before the invention of the "IMG" tag. When it came along, that was a big deal. The NCSA "What's New on the web" page was updated with a few new web pages each day. And that was almost a comprehensive list!
In any case, the bigger deal for me was when the EWS lab manager (Ed Kubaitis, I think) installed httpd and students were allowed to created their own web pages and serve them worldwide via www.ews.uiuc.edu/~username/ urls. I realized that EVERYONE could be a content provider, not just a select few (as was the gopher model), and this was going to be unstoppable. I even HTML-ized the existing PovRay faq, put it on my student account, sent mail out to the PovRay mailing list, and had hits within a few minutes. That was a rush, too.
To encourage people to provide content (and get linked) I created the "UIUC People" page, which started as a list to every student homepage I knew about at UIUC. It had four entries. That quickly changed, as you can imagine.
I don't know who decided to add the "~username" syntax to httpd, allowing mere users to add content to the global web (was it a part of CERN, or did McCool add that to NCSA?) but I'm convinced that was a key factor in getting the early web going. It's certainly what got me interested.