Slashdot Mirror
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...'"
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
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, 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.