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Internaut Day Might Not Be the Web Anniversary You're Looking For (fortune.com)
David Meyer, reporting for Fortune: The web arguably went public before August 23, 1991. Social media users are enthusiastically celebrating "Internaut Day" on Tuesday. They're thanking Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, for first providing public access to it on this day in 1991, precisely a quarter of a century back. The only problem is that the supposed importance of Internaut Day doesn't seem to be supported by much evidence. Berners-Lee submitted his seminal proposal for a new information management system to CERN on March 12, 1989, a date which Berners-Lee celebrates as the birthday of the web. The building blocks were specified and written up by October 1990, and the first webpage went live in December that year. So when somebody celebrates the "Internaut Day" today, it really doesn't seem like the right occasion. The report adds: According to Wikipedia, that's when "new users could [first] access" the web -- and that's what a gazillion news stories on Tuesday are supposedly celebrating. But it doesn't square with what the Web Foundation and CERN say.
Isn't swarming around fads driven by shoddy information what 'social media' is for? It certainly seems to be the typical use case.
The first real breakthrough that brought digital communications to the masses was the various Bulletin Board systems. What did people do with them? Looked for pr0n, buying and selling stuff, uploading and downloading software, pictures, etc., sending each other messages about what they were doing ... the medium (dial-up or tcp/ip) wasn't important from the people perspective.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
That reminds me of when I thought I was far too late in starting my first web business, in 1996. I lamented that there would have been a lot of potential if I had gotten in early, but the web had already been around for five years. Why hadn't I gotten in early, darn it! :)
Considering that a large portion of the globe believe and celebrate the birth of a god on Dec 25th, despite the fact that there is no evidence at all that this truely happened, I think we can probably let this inaccuracy slide.
At least we know the internet really did happen.
Not sure why Tim gets credit when hyper-linking was demo'd back in 1968 ...
The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Alan Kay points out the same thing @17:03
Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful
https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t...
It sounds like everyone is arguing about semantics. What is considered the actual "birth date"?
I'm a web developer. What is considered the birth date of a website? When the client comes to me with a proposal or I go to them with one? If I was Berners-Lee, it sounds like that is the birth date of the website. If the site is ready for internal testing, is that the birth date? That sounds like what CERN says it is when it was available internally but possibly not externally. Or is the site's birth date when it's publicly available, ready for the world to see and use, which is what I would call it.
Or putting it in human terms, Berners-Lee's birth date sounds more like the date of conception, CERN's date more like when you have an ultrasound and you know it's there and can "see" it but it's not ready for the world yet, and publicly accessible when the little guy actually shoots out of mom.
To commemorate this momentous occasion I suggest we play Green Day's "Wake me up when September Ends" with a Followup of a retelling of the classic tale "Rip Van Winkle"... Whadayamean I'm 2 years too soon? What the hell is a year? The current day is Tue Sep 8393 1993, isn't it?
And Sir Lee's was not even the first system for linking documents/files across the networks — Gopher was. And Gopher was not merely proposed in 1991, that's when an actual system became available (though protocol was codified in an RFC only in 1993).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why no mention of Al Gore? I am outraged, I say!
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
March, 1989
https://www.w3.org/History/198...
Wikipedia cites its sources. If journalists did the same, we would find out they get everything from Wikipedia, instead of looking to see where Wikipedia got it.
Except when journalists go to Wikipedia and quote it, then a Wikipedia editor goes back and attributes the journalist's article as the source of the information found in the Wikipedia article.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Interwebinaut Day would be more fitting.
The Internet was arguably invented either in 1969 or when IPv4 rolled out in the early 1980s, depending on whether you "count" the pre-IPv4 Internet as "the Internet" or not.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The invention of the telegraph and the wide-scale availability to the paying masses through commercial telegraph operators was arguably the first real breakthrough in electronic digital communications, assuming you consider the "on/off" of Morse-code-type telegraphy to be digital, which I do.
Smoke signals, semaphore signals, and other forms of non-electronic long-distance communication are also typically digital. As to whether they were "available to the masses" or not, that varies.
Writing, whether using alphabets or pictographs, is arguably a form of digital communications. Speaking in words or groups of sub-word sounds (phonemes and syllables) that have distinct meanings is arguably digital (as opposed to analog), as long as the dictionary size is, for all practical purposes limited. This is the case for all conventional spoken and written human languages that I am aware of.
So, in that sense, we humans have been using digital forms of communication since, well, ever since we started talking to each other, which likely pre-dates humanity itself.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is the kind of thing that Comic Book Guy gets excited about - and nobody else cares.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The write-up and TFA conflate the Internet and (what became known as web). Maybe, the slines don't know any better, but Slashdot users ought to... The hyperlinked documents weren't the first "killer application" — e-mail was. The first systems weren't even using the Internet, but, according to Wikipedia:
And Sir Lee's was not even the first system for linking documents/files across the networks — Gopher was. And Gopher was not merely proposed in 1991, that's when an actual system became available (though protocol was codified in an RFC only in 1993).
If you want to get "technical" the web (aka http/html) was first (1990 vs 1991 for gopher), but the graphical browser mosaic didn't appear until '93 and not to many folks were using the non-graphical web servers that were in existence at the time.
If email was the killer app, inter-domain mail (via unix mail via rmail/UUCP) was probably the real killer app, not ARPANET email as ARPANET was mostly restricted to non-commercial use. Gopher like the "web" didn't really pop up until '91 when the NSFNET (the modern "internet") was winding down and the commercial internet was ramping up (the various NAPs like MAE and CIX, etc were taking off). Prior to inter-domain unix mail, commercial email was generally *unconnected* (needed to be on the same proprietary system like compuserve to send/receive mail).
Film at 11.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Look, WWW is all nice and stuff, but frankly before NCSA Mosaic was released you could not really tell the difference between Gopher and WWW, and while they were interesting to play with, it was just play (unlike USENET News which had real value :). Somehow Viola never had much impact either.
NCSA Mosaic was originally released January 23, 1993. I gasped when I first saw it, because I had been dreaming of a global hypermedia network, and it showed that was possible. That day changed my life from someone who was an electrical engineer to someone who designed early commercial web sites.
Version 1.0 for Windows was released on November 11, 1993, and of course that is when "normal human beings" had any chance of getting on the Web.
Partying on the day you were conceived would just feel very awkward, I guess.
I would say, Lee's web was indistinguishable from Gopher back then. Certainly not until Mosaic offered graphical browsing.
But that too existed already in the 1970-80ies... The actual interconnections remained scarce, but software and protocols for distinct computers to exchange "emails" appeared much earlier than the celebrated 1991.
I'd also add, that Sir Lee's affable personality — and the fact, that he is not an American — contribute to the "cult".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
people do have their names :)
Not really; according to the US Census Bureau, there are about 1800 Americans with my (first+last) name. And probably a whole bunch of them have the same middle name, which is also one of the top 10 men's names in the US. My parents didn't have much imagination when it came to baby names.
OTOH, my wife continues to use her birth name for most purposes (which is fine by me). She likes the fact that, as far as she can determine, she's the only living human with that name. (And it's not even some unpronounceable "foreign" sounding name. She also likes to point out to people that her name is a syntactically correct English sentence. She has even found archived newspaper images that have her name at the top of a story. ;-)
But anyway, most of us don't "have" our names in any meaningful sense. We're just one of many who are using the name for a few decades, until we drop out of the crowd that are using it.
In college, I had a friend who was a member of the Bill Smith Club, whose only membership criterion is that you be named (or married to someone named) Bill Smith (or William Smythe or Wilhelm Schmidt or anything else that maps onto the name).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.