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A Brief History of the Internet
Ant writes "'Many young people around the world use the internet every day, and yet they have no memory of the history that led to the creation of the global network. Many have no understanding of how or why the internet has developed. As part of out continuing efforts to combat ignorance around the world, The Lemon is proud to present this timeline...'"
But he was resposible for seeing that it got funding, and was pushed into the private sector. Credit where credit is due.
1981 - Bill Gates embarks on heroic and lifelong quest to piss off every person in America.
1992 - World-Wide Web released by CERN. Group suggests someone invent a web browser so people can use it.
Bill Gates gets a mention (although not a positive one) but Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web doesn't? How bad is that?
It amazes me that Berners-Lee isn't more widely acknowledged for his contribution to today's internet. Granted he's never been a man who's to court publicity, but he will go down in history as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.
Arguably, he's been as important to the information revolution as Gutenberg was to the printing one. I'm not saying that he created everything single-handedly, only that his work should be acknowledged.
Yes, I realise that the The Lemon timeline is meant to be jokey but shouldn't a guy who's made so much possible for so many - for geeks the world over to argue with each other over which edition of AD&D is the best, people who've never had a social life to order a bride without leaving their front rooms and teenagers everywhere to download more porn than their Dad's could ever have imagined - get at least a tip of the hat?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Is there any way to mod this entire story as (-1, Overrated)?
Seriously, this has to be one of the most useless and uninteresting items to appear on Slashdot in the recent past. A real history of the internet? Maybe that would be an interesting read. But this garbage from The Lemon is completely worthless, not even funny (it tries, yet fails miserably), and unworthy of even a mention on Fark.
And if you were real lucky, you had a good selection in your local calling area.
Ah, those were the days...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
just a few examples:
... )
... by that time I stopped using Windos, but didn't 95 came out somewhere in the middle of 96 ?)
1977: email invented. most common message: "let me know when you are there so i can call you.
(Family archives show as #1: "did you get this [email]?" and "are you there ?")
1978: Spreadsheet, 10 years till anyone knows how to use them.
(Show me one person who has a usefull use for spreadsheets
1995: AOL, Compuserve, etc take off
(I canceled my CIS account in late 1995, after using it for quite a while.
Erm - shute, I wanted to, but I didn't....)
1995: Release of Windows'95
(Erm
1997: Internet Porn introduced to businesses. Worker productivity down 97%
('97? I could swear Admiral K. sold his stuff for websites long before that [ESCdd])
2001: Blogging invented.
(hey, my first lj-entry is Aug 29th, 2000 - and I joined the bandwaggon very late.)
ps:
semicolon-dash-closing bracket
On the other side of the screen it all looked so easy.
Well, as you probably know, humor is a matter of taste. I found it funny. If you've been reading Slashdot long, you should know it's not much of serious news source.
It always amuses me when /. lags so far behind the times.
Slashdot should stick to news stories. Checking blogdex and daypop once a day gives me a far better grasp of what 'cool links' are makign their way around the internet.
My Journal
The guy must be a Farker.
Cheers man, you just got slashdotted!
#1) Usenet was mentioned
#2) It's a humor article, not an official document
#3) Dates are made up for most part, because *gasp* see #2
Thank you. Come again.
If that something is a single event, then it must be fundamentaly different, and destroy the prior 'world': Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Marx' theory of class struggle (good and bad).
What did the Apollo moon landings destroy? Or climbing Mount Everest? Or the creation of the Olympic movement? Or Pasteur's work in medicine?
I'm sorry, but I don't see how something has to be destructive, even in the loosest sense of the word as you're applying it, to be either influential or historical.
Oh, and as for just who "invented" the television, well, that's a real can of worms you've opened there. Farnsworth? George Carey? W. E. Sawyer? Edwin Belin? Vladimir Kosma Zworykin? John Logie Baird? Denes von Mihaly? Take your pick.
Farnsworth's showed off his technology on September 7, 1927. Baird's first public demonstration (to the general public in a department store) was on March 25, 1925, and he had a working model a year earlier.
Of all the pioneers who can claim to have invented the television, Farnsworth's claim isn't the strongest. But, obviously, because he was American he's the one Americans credit.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Actually, his quest seems to be to piss off every person in the world.
And he's getting pretty good at it, too.
Big woo, it's the same with everything that's invented. I've never really gone back and appreciated the history of the toaster, but I use it every day.
Americans do not understand irony.
Apparently the do not. Do you know what irony is? If you're claiming that The Onion is ironic, then I guess you don't.
I have a feeling you meant satire or possibly sarcasm, but you're probably too confused to figure out which.
Well, if Tim Berners-Lee had only held on to his "world wide web" then we'd probably all be speaking his name now...
No. If TBL had "held on to" the WWW, nobody would ever had heard of it, or him. One of the major benefits of the WWW is that it is open for anybody to write browsers, servers, or run websites. If TBL had ever tried to exert control, the WWW would have been dropped instantly. Licensing was one of the things that killed gopher.
No, he rode the wave. Saying something is happening does not mean you made it happen. A case of a post hoc ergo proper hoc argument, for you classicists out there.
The ARPANET (or ARPA Internet as some called it at the time) existedbefore Gore was in office. Gore had nothing to do with its creation, and never really claimed to. It had a backbone, which became MILNET after DARPA cut off all the nodes which couldn't justify their connection in terms of support for military projects. Gore's legislation created a new backbone, run by the National Science Foundation. Without it, and without Gore's follow-on legislation opening it up to commercial use, the Internet as we know it would not exist. You can quibble with the phrase "took the initiative in creating the Internet" (more accurate would be "created the backbone of the modern Internet"), but it doesn't change the fact that Gore's role was a crucial one.