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On This Day 25 Years Ago, the Web Became Public Domain (popularmechanics.com)
On April 30, 1993, CERN -- the European Organization for Nuclear Research -- announced that it was putting a piece of software developed by one of its researchers, Tim Berners-Lee, into the public domain. That software was a "global computer networked information system" called the World Wide Web, and CERN's decision meant that anyone, anywhere, could run a website and do anything with it. From a report: While the proto-internet dates back to the 1960s, the World Wide Web as we know it had been invented four year earlier in 1989 by CERN employee Tim Berners-Lee. The internet at that point was growing in popularity among academic circles but still had limited mainstream utility. Scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf had developed Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which allowed for easier transfer of information. But there was the fundamental problem of how to organize all that information.
In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks. In a proposal, Berners-Lee asked CERN management to "imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse."
Four years later, the project was still growing. In January 1993, the first major web browser, known as MOSAIC, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While there was a free version of MOSAIC, for-profit software companies purchased nonexclusive licenses to sell and support it. Licensing MOSAIC at the time cost $100,000 plus $5 each for any number of copies.
In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks. In a proposal, Berners-Lee asked CERN management to "imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse."
Four years later, the project was still growing. In January 1993, the first major web browser, known as MOSAIC, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While there was a free version of MOSAIC, for-profit software companies purchased nonexclusive licenses to sell and support it. Licensing MOSAIC at the time cost $100,000 plus $5 each for any number of copies.
I remember spending hours trying to get Mosaic to comple under SLS linux. ahh the X driver issues, the horror of it all but after a week i managed to get it up and running.
I've been using this wonderful technology called "computer" for a while. I recently came up with a neat application for it, and I'm going to call it "calculator" -- they might as well be synonyms, since most people will never use any other applications on it.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
And the world has never been more divided.
We licensed it to test our new web site that I don't think any customers even used until a couple of years later. The site was pretty crappy since I learned HTML from viewing the source on other sites, and it took me a lot of time so that was a huge waste of money.
Champaign instead of Champagne
Those were the good old days, when there were lots of different web sites and if you didn't like one, you could go to another. Many of us remember "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Somehow we got to a point where Facebook and Google interpret the free Internet as damage and route around it.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I was such a Pollyanna back then, with my Utopian vision of how people were going to use the Internet; to share and exchange new ideas and information and further human understanding; to have intellectual exchanges with people on the other side of the world I'd never met... :P
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Imagine a headline saying “The 25th anniversary of the end of net neutrality”?
The irony is this is being reported by on a paywalled site that doesn't work when using a host file to block ads.
"Invented the internet" is nonsense. TCP/IP wasn't the only (or first) transport protocol, HTML wasn't the only document language, and MOSAIC wasn't even the first HTML browser, much less the first browser. Without these technologies the web would have been worse, for that they deserve credit, but it would still exist. Al Gore actually had a much better claim here - the DARPA funding was critical in the beginning.
MOSAIC was written at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, not Champagne. Generally UIUC students had cheaper tastes and drank more Budweiser and Miller Lite...
Back then domain names were $100 for 2 years. Hosting was an additional $10/mo or so, if you weren't fortunate enough to be at a school or work someplace which let you set up your own web server (I had one for myself, and another for my dog - IPv4 addresses were plentiful back then too).
Those costs are what drove people to "free" web services like GeoCities, MySpace, and eventually Facebook. You can justify the cost to set up your own domain and website if it's going to be a business venture or a major part of your online profile. But for the vast majority of people, it wasn't worth it. Which is what allowed the personal-info-harvesting vultures to swoop in and take over the web as we know it today. In some ways I think it was actually better before the web, when simply having an account on an Internet service automatically gave you a finger profile you could fill out however you wanted at no additional cost.
Nowadays most ISPs also give you some free web space (and an email address) with your account. But it's too little, too late.
What was a great idea has been perverted into something foul and cancerous. Get in your time machine and take it back. Dialup BBSs were bad enough, but at least they were local.
Back in the late 90s people would take their interests or hobbies put them on a website and then promptly add feel-good widgets like web counters and guestbooks to boost their egos a bit, feel like they had an audience rather than just throwing information into the void.
That was the seed of social media right there. Web counters evolved into web rings, communities, user scores and eventually huge public forums like Twitter and Facebook. A users own ego is actively played by these systems to encourage more usage, more content. The more activity on those sites the more people were interested, the whole "fear of missing out" deal.
Now we have these behemoth sites that play the human ego like a fiddle, vast reams of junk generated every second, and people from all walks of life with either an overinflated sense of self worth or, low self esteem (or paradoxically both,) because of some arbitrary number.
The internet has connected us in ways we couldn't have predicted 50 years ago, but the web has irreversibly changed our social structures. Whether it's for the better or worse I don't know...
I was working at Indiana University at the time. In the fall of 1993 I found the world wide web. I got xmosaic working on my unix desktop and also installed NCSA httpd. I downloaded the HTML specification and got to work implementing web pages. At the time, I had pages that took 30 seconds to generate.
Our department (basically IT for the university) was smack dab in the middle of moving our information services from the VAX/VMS cluster to the newfangled gopher service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Along with a few other folks I did a "stop the presses" and convinced them to abandon that project and go straight to the WWW. It took a lot of convincing since they were so invested in getting gopher up and running. Plus, the text-only information was a pretty easy direct-map to gopher.
The browsers were really primitive at the time. No stylesheets, but we had inline images and could set background colors.
Not only that, the development was mainly done on the X11 platform. The Windows and Mac browsers were always lagging in features.
Fill-out forms were a new thing, and the sub ordering application was the standard demonstration for that. Before fill-out forms, there was the "isindex" tag which would show a search box, the contents of which would be added as the "query" part of the url when you hit enter.
There were no cookies and thus no real way to keep state. When I quit the university, we were working on a way to store session information in files on the back end. The idea was basically what PHP was doing back around 1999 - give the user an MD5 hash or something that was used as the query portion of the url. Every url had to go through CGI, and the script would look up the file containing the session information and read it in, and possibly write it out. We wanted to move some of the administrative actions - such as students setting up accounts - to the web. Since fill-out forms weren't really available on the Mac and Windows platforms, we were looking at using "isindex" to get all information to the backend.
It's amazing how far we've come in 25 years. I started doing heavy web development in 1999 and even then it was amazing how far it had advanced.
Do you have ESP?
I love these stories about old tech, that references something that at the time was new and exciting but of course today is old hat; it kind of emphasizes how much things have changed and entered into common parlance.
"In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks."
Dr. Evil "...which was in essence a sophisticated heat beam which we called a (uses air quotes) LASER."
Seriously, even back then, Berners-lee will tell you that WWW was NOT a 1 man project.
Hypertext came from a number of people such as Bush, and Nelson, along with Apple.
HTML was simply an implementation of IBM's GML.
Cern httpd was a straight forward implementation of FTP (thank god for that).
Probably the one thing that Berners-lee's group really did was put all of this together and then open-sourced it
while companies were getting pieces/parts, but then trying to figure out how to control and profit from them.
Some random fella named "Tim" didn't make the World Wide Web!!! Al Gore created the Internet and the World Wide Web. We all know that.
Yup, Al Gore, the guy who pumps megatonnes of Carbon into the atmosphere and releases floods to water his lawn while telling all the rest of us to reduce our carbon footprint. You see, it's ok for HIM to "Do as I say" instead of "Do as I do" because he buys carbon offsets that go right back into his pocket. So it's all good.
Wait, what were we talking about?
In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks.
Which term, along with "Hypertext", several others, and much of the vision of a web of interconnected online documents, had been coined and promoted by Ted Nelson, many years before. See the first edition of Computer Lib/Dream Machines" (1974), for an early treatment of the ideas, and _Literary Machines_ for a more developed one.
His (ill-fated) Project Xanadu was, by that time, funded and working round-the-clock to try to put together a world electronic library - with substantially more functionality (including an attempt to provide an acceptable emulation of or substitute for everything you can do with paper publications), when Tim's work hit the net and created the World Wide Web.
Xanadu deviated from the WWW design in a number of ways, including:
- "fine-grained links" (where a link end points to a particular range of a target, rather than a whole page or a point within it {unless you want that to be the target}),
- bi-directional links (you can inquire what links are inbound to where you are reading and follow them backward)
- avoidance of the "Library of Alexandra" / broken link problem by distributed database techniques.
and I could go on.
But they had bitten off a BIG problem, and the WWW, with its non-proprietary servers filled an immediate need with an immediately usable solution.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's worse. I'm now disconnecting from the Internet. I'm sick to death of having headhunters trying to me down and jam my application into companies that just want to move their brightest graduates into management or some other field that I absolutely want to stay away from.
Oops. Pointed the link to the search, not the document.
See the first edition of _Computer Lib/Dream Machines"_ (1974), for an early treatment of the ideas, and _Literary Machines_ for a more developed one.
(Note that the printed version of the book was two half-books, like an Ace Double, which you flipped over to read one vs. the other. In the above PDF link you read the _Dream Machines_ half - which is where you find the Hypertext stuff - by starting at the first page and flipping pages forward, the _Computer Lib_ half - which is mostly about what-it-is-a-computer - by starting at the last page and flipping pages backward.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It was so much better back then, so much less absolute crap.
The internet was filled with just information and mostly intelligent people, the masses had no fucking clue.
It's been a wild ride seeing the internet develop, if only we could take modern hardware / network speed back then to the better content / contributors
I used Trumpet.
BLINK tag sucked.