Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Significant Documents of the Internet
coldfusion submits this
thought provoking question:
"If you were creating an anthology of documents which have profoundly affected computing and the Internet, what would you choose? Some examples: Eric Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar or John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Items could be technologically, socially, and economically significant -- either in negative (eg., a lot of
US laws) or positive ways. There's a lot to discuss here.
Another question has occured to me as I write this: has such an anthology been created? If not, wouldn't it be a worthwhile project to create a web-based anthology of the most important documents which have defined the very nature of the internet (and technology in general) today and in the future? There are anthologies of historically significant writings in the founding and early development of the USA, so why not one for the founding and early development of the internet?"
A bit long for normal "anthologization," but it's an important document's that's been released for internet distribution.
i ng/Hacker_Crackdown/
A copy can be found at:
http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/Bruce_Sterl
- Lawrence Person
http://www.delphi.com/sflit/novaexpress/
everyone knows al gore invented the internet
one nice quote:
I do not mean to criticize that work, but is "The Cathedral and the Bazar" really a document from the history of the Internet? I'm sure we'd all like it to be a part of the future, but what does it have to do with creating the Internet? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the question, but I would think you're talking about maybe early essays (did they even write essays?) by Burners-Lee or Andreeson or someone else like that (at least as far as WWW goes). What does ESR's work have to do with it? Sure, it's significant, but it seems like it's full effect is more in the making than already made.
I would think that some of the early and seminal FAQs should be in such a repository; the news.announce.newusers FAQ, for example, and whichever the first *.marketplace FAQ was (as examples as the first attempts to suggest proper general netiquette and the netiquette of business tranasactions over the Net).
As a previous poster said, it's a bit premature to undertake such a task. I agree it's an interesting mental excercise, but while we're at it, let's account for some variables.
By all measures, the internet is becoming an advertising medium, much akin to the early development of radio or TV. "The great educator," and all that. Wonderful, noble visions, but it didn't pan out that way. Where is the internet REALLY going, folks? And more importantly, how will that affect the history of the medium itself?
Someone mentioned the gcc's popularity and the GPL -- I assume they were thinking along the lines of the GNU Manifesto. That's fine and good, but look at how quickly C became the dominant language. It could get supplanted by something better (ooo, perhaps even something PROPRIARITY) in a rather rapid fashion, given the correct circumstances.
Along those same lines, the open source movement could blink out pretty quickly. "No, no, heritic!" they cry. But sure. If C drifts away, and corporations decide their best bet for short term profits (what most corps. are after) is closed source, Open Source as a movement will flounder. The code will still be there, sure, but if no one's using that code, it doesn't amount to much. I know I've got a lot of useless COBOL kicking around on disks in a closet. Don't you?
What if the libritarians have their way and anti-trust laws are repealed? Even if it's not microsoft, we could see someone else come in dominate, and pretty much control what we use.
(As someone pointed out the other day, the gimp won't infringe on photoshop's market anytime soon because of the panatone process and it's associated patents. A few more patents like that, and we're in a different world.)
I do believe that ESR has secured himself a footnote in history, with the _Cathedral_ being the impetus for Netscape's decision to go open source and all that. But c'mon... as a business move it was the only option, and as an open source move it's sort of dead in the water. It's plausable that it's all downhill from there. Unless more people get on the bandwagon pretty quick and make it WORK, well...
I'd also like to point to the rather obvious fact that usage of computers and the internet requires a lot less technological knowledge than it used to. And when most histories are written, the heavy engineering side is omitted. When was the last time most people (I hesitate to address you, the reader directly, given your high degree of technological knowledge) read a history of radio that really got into the details? How many people really know what farnsworth, deforrest, and marconi _did_? If they do know, it's probably something vague like "fed back amplifer" or something to that effect.
As we're all acutely aware, history is written by the winners. And we don't really know who'll win yet, where this medium will be. This doesn't make conjecture moot, but just spouting off stuff that's "neat," like I said, might be a bit premature.
Honestly, what makes Cathedral and Bazzar so special in terms of the internet, anyways? It's a 5 or 6 page paper. It describes the nature of Open Source Software, and does that quite well. Sure, it exists on the internet, but that makes it no more relevant than the thousands of Geocities pages.
If you've got to find some kind of What Makes The Internet What It Is Today collection, look no further than the USA's Bill of Rights, and the results of it's existance - the ability of anyone to say anything, and be heard when they do it. That's the one and ONLY thing that separates Internet from Radio and Print Media, when you get right down to it. Live radio is instantaneous, free, and widely available, but content censored. Print Media is more or less free and open, but wide distribution is near impossible (without a HUGE bankroll or LOTS of time), and it's almost never up-to-the-second current.
Hrm... did I have a point in all this? Damn... I forgot!
--
--
Just lurking, thanks!
From ESR, I would add The Jargon File. The Cathedral And the Bazaar is more about Software than the Internet, but if that's there, than RMS's Why Software Should Be Free should also be there.
Another critically important RMS piece (and one more relevant to the internet) is The Right to Read.
Also there's The Declaration of Independence [of the USA], not as a document in its own right, but as the first entry into Project Gutenberg.
Getting more internetty, you've got RFC Number 1, the description of the tentative IMP protocol to be used between the four systems on the brand spanking new ARPA network.
Going to distant history (in computer terms) there is the 1945 paper by Vandemaar Bush, As We May Think, one of the inspirations for the ARPA project.
There's the 1989 whitepaper from CERN's Tim Berners-Lee, Information Management: A Proposal, the paper that started the WWW.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Great idea! Let's start by GZIPing all related RFCs ;-)
Seriously, only time will show which papers have captured the 'birth' of the Internet and should be saved. It's too early to do this now. Our perspective is too subjective.
But that's just my personal opinion. So there.
Up until then, pretty much every other "standards" process was the result of endless debates on highly politicized committees (e.g. OSI) or was imposed ba a single powerful entity, most likely a vendor (in the old days it would have been IBM or DEC, nowadays it's more likely to be Microsoft), on everyone else. The Internet standardization process changed all that; standards were now created as part of a consensus by people who built things that worked well.
The very name of the documents--"Request for Comment"--implies this consensus-building process, that even the most fundamental standards are not "set in stone," but are subject to revision whenever deemed necessary. It's this kind of approach--maintaining consensus, keeping it simple, and staying flexible enough to deal with technological change--that made Internet protocol implementations as widespread as they are, and in turn made the Internet as popular as it is. This kind of "open standards" practice also forms one of the firm underpinnings of the entire Open Source movement.
I'm glad to see that there are efforts underway to collect and preserve the entire RFC series. These documents are vital to understanding, not only the history of the Net, but some of the reasons why it has become so widespread.
Eric
--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
How about a copy of the posting that those green card lawyers sent to Usenet? Probably not the first instance of what we now call "spam" but definately the first bigtime one where people called attention to it. Archiving spam is a pretty lame concept but no one can deny that it has had a huge impact on the lives of everyone who spends even a little time on the net.
The EFF has a large archive about the issues of Freedom on the Internet. But they also have all kind of paper about the various social issues:
http://www.eff.org/archives.html
Yes, telnet really is a protocol. The telnet client does some negotiation with the server, mostly about the terminal type of the client. If you try connecting with a raw socket to a telnet server, it (most of the time) won't work. That's why netcat has a -t option to do telnet negotiation.
Yes, HTTP is a fairly simple human-readable protocol, but it's still a protocol. HTTP/1.1 is somewhat more complicated, though still not really very complex.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I would definitely not put "the cathedral and the bazaar" as a significant document of the internet. My list would probably consist almost exclusively of RFCs. How can anything be more important to the development of the internet than the RFCs establishing TCP/IP, FTP, IRC, HTTP, telnet, and a variety of other protocols?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Personally I think code and technology has had the most profound impact on the Internet. ARPA, UUCP, BGP, bind, sendmail, Mosaic, Netscape, Apache, etc. Papers come after the fact and tend to talk about stuff already there. Remove one of the above pieces of technology and the Internet would be very different today. Remove most of the papers people might come up with and I doubt things would be all that different.
I would include a smallish section on the birth of usenet spam, and the subsequent (near) death of usenet as a result. Documents relating to C&S's infamous Green Card Spam might be appropriate (the original post, possibly a sampling of posts to the various news.admin.abuse groups, etc.)
I think the Internet worm qualifies, as well, and Melissa may be of interest years later.
I first accessed the Internet in 1992. I used it for email, usenet, and ftp. I really didn't pay much attention to the more non-collaborative services-- WAIS, gopher, HTTP. IMHO, Usenet wasn't as conducive to essay writing as HTML is today. To only include essays and single documents in preference to (edited) usenet threads would be a mistake.
This is interesting but way too hypothetical and speculative; as you say, an unlikely scenario. Would not likelier scenarios be more interesting -- such as the fact the the continued use of the GPL disperses the power from the computing elite to computing newcomers, thus making computer technology have a more democratic basis? That is much more likely to happen and fortunately makes for a better society.
OK, I know this in itself was not influential, but the stuff it documents was, is, and will be, influential. Every Slashdotter must read that story! If you are too cheap to buy it, get it from the library. The whole book is great, but Part One and the Epilogue (together less than 170 fast-moving pages) give a fascinating portrayal of the best kind of spirit that is behind computer innovation.
It is sometimes glaringly obvious that some Slashdotters have not read this stuff. Please read it, and even if you have read it, but a couple of years have gone by and you have grown stale, read it again.
This seminal FAQ is one of the documents that has changed the internet for the better: hundreds of thousands of stupid arguments never occured because someone read this first and THOUGHT before they posted.
I think all the RFCs provide an execellent historical account of how the Internet (and lately the web) have developed. They show how standards have evolved to meet the needs of the increasing number of users and new uses the Internet has been put to. Other similar documents from the IETF and the W3C would also be important.
Of course, some may view these as just "technical" documents, but considering that the Internet *is* a technical thing, and has evolved according to some sort of techno-sociological phenomenon, it seems appropriate.
Reading through 150+ posts, what I find most striking is how few suggestions there are, beyond the RFC's. Anyway, I'd propose Chuq von Rosbach's Usenet etiquette guide (even if he did once chew me out for an off-topic posting on an Apple mailing list).
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
But then, I'm prejudiced where the OSD is concerned :-)
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Any essay citing emacs as an example of the clarity and efficacy of consensus-based coding falls a bit short... Zoinks.
Any proposal citing GNU Emacs as an example of the clarity and efficacy of consensus-based coding falls a bit short... Zoinks!
It's still boggling that arguments like that sold Jim Barksdale on Open Source.
Don't get me wrong, I believe in this stuff. Just not the ESR-ified and RMS-ified versions.
Oh and on the topic itself-- Do an archive, just don't do one that's too full of itself, which is the problem with most ventures like that. And for god's sake do some nice html. Two-thirds of the Linux sites out there *still* look like somebody's sophomore research project page.
...I'd vote for PBS's series "Triumph of the Nerds". A very good look at what got to where we are. A bit dated now, it is nonetheless in my opinion required viewing for nerds and geeks of all types. :)
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Russ Allbery's A Rant. I don't know that it's profoundly affected anything, but there's a good chunk of what's good and bad about Usenet and why anyone should care in there.
As Stephenson points out in his foreward to the paperback Snow Crash, unbeknownst to him when he wrote it, Apple (i think) had written VR software using what they also called 'avatars'. The idea was in the ether, and many people discussing the notion of multi-person VR's independantly used the term, meaning 'the manifestation of a Hindu deity (especially Vishnu) in human or superhuman or animal form; "the Buddha is considered an avatar of the god Vishnu"'.
No one, so far as i know, predicted that Quake would be the first popular instantiation of it.
mahlen
Remember: the average is as close to the bottom as it is to the top.
--anonymous
This is actually something that waxes and wanes with time. Back in 1982 i was trying to get into the CS department at Berkeley; it was tremendously full; people with B+ averages weren't getting in, about one person in five would actually get into classes they requested, the department advised everyone to have back-up majors in mind. This was, you'll recall, when the first PC revolution was really coming down, Atari and Apple were high-flying companies, and people who were looking for big money careers looked to CS. I even met someone who was getting a CS degree, but really wanted to do sales.
But then the bottom dropped out of the small computer market, and Wall Street traders became the instant-wealth spotlight (on borrowed money, but that's another matter). All the greedy people became Business Administration majors, and by the time i graduated (1989), the CS department was welcoming people with open arms.
It's sad that the pendulum has swung back, mainly because i don't think that one can be a good programmer/engineer without loving the field. Of course, the job market is so overheated right now that you don't have to be that good. But still, people who persue CS for the money will hate the work, i'd guess.
mahlen
Cthulhu for President
Don't settle for the lesser evil!
--Chaosium Inc., 1992
I suppose it is relevant to the net, a little. In that it talks about a method of software development, that is alot more feasable via the internet.
But I would hazard a guess, that the primary reason for mentioning that it is a necessity, is that it's a pro-GPL document. And every slashdotter knows that GPL will save the world from the great satan(Bill G. that is).
I think that it's inclusion is just an example of the strong editorial bias of the site.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Somehow, I think 10-15 years down the line, these documents will prove to be very interesting.
The road Ahead, Mr. Gates? I see Linux..... -Accipiter
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Gcc-1.40 and a posix-question
Message-ID:
Date: 3 Jul 91 10:00:50 GMT
Hello netlanders,
Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Gcc-1.40 and a posix-question
Message-ID: <1991Jul3.100050.9886@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 3 Jul 91 10:00:50 GMT
Hello netlanders,
Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.
2) "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
3) the communications decency act, and it's reprecussions.
4) Adminspotting... sure, it's a little obscure, but most admins have been in such a category, and in one essay sums up what most of us feel on a day to day basis. besides, what historical event in human existance doesn't have some sort of ironic humor?
5) the diary of the people at UNLV who sent the first data packets over the phone line. ("we typed an 'L' in 'login', and UCLA got it. We then typed the 'O', and the computer crashed")
Thank you for the suggestion, Anonymous, but many of us have tried that and failed. Nobody's perfect. We happen to be socially inept, so we redirect our sexual energy into code and such. Don't deny us what sparse joy is to be had from the 'Net.
What we do may not cure loneliness, but it sure qualifies as human progress. Ask any captain of industry.
One of the first (if not the first) ARPANET mailing lists was HUMAN-NETS, formed before many Slashdot readers were even born. Many of the discussions there anticipated the Internet of today. It's a precurser to USENET, and to discussion sites like this. Unfortunately, although some of the last HUMAN-NETS postings are archived in http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/FA.human-nets /FA.human-nets-index.html, I don't know where earlier issues are archived.
Such an archive would be a record of the earliest wide-ranging (not just technical) discussion on a computer network.
"As We May Think" by Vanover Bush would have to
be at the top of any such list.
I agree with everyone who has said that software documents have no little or no bearing on Internet development.
I'm surprised that no-one has gone back and considered Fidonet. It was BBSing that introduced a lot of people to the online concept, and I dont think there was any more important document to the BBSing community than the oft-misinterepreted "Policy 4" in its various incarnations.
It was this document that attempted to organise the network that in a lot of places, the Internet has modelled itself around (in the ideas of information interchange and filtering down from a top via 'nodes') - and this document that angered people enough to the point that there could be no similar such control placed over Usenet/the Internet itself.
Craig
So you want to categorize everything relevant to the Internet, since the first days of Eniac and maybe even some trivia about what came before (telegraph, phone systems, etc.). The problem here is: the net is so big and touches so many topics, iteracting with each other in a way that truly resembles a web.
For example, we have the phreakers' history. Sure, they shaped a lot of our current world (if it weren't for them, and from the ones who borrowed the name 'hackers' and started compromissing lots of sites' security, we would have almost no security on our systems today; no flames please).
Then we have the other 'hackers' history, this one portrayed in the now-ESR-maintained Jargon File. It also has a lot of history of its own, including the recent events (which are a lot).
If we zoom in a bit, we get (for example) the Debian's history. How it started, how it grow, the issues it faced, etc; and the Slashdot's tale, a virtual pub with its anti-M$ zealots, censorship attempts, the First Posters, MEEPT!, the gnulix_guy, and lots of other people.
Then we go back out and drift a bit. We get the tales of an awful clone of a brain-dead OS, the os called CP/M and the clone is... Well you can guess it. This is also long, we had years and years of borging and fighting, from the bad to the worst to the not-so-bad (5.0+), then (in parallel) the almost unknown old Windozes, the best-of-all Win3.1x, and the progressive bloat of the 9x family.
We also have a corner for the spammers history, entangled with the USENET and email history. We have a corner for the UNIX wars and their siblings (*BSD). We have a corner for rec.pets.cats and the crosspost flammage that went there.
All of this is significant for some groups and completely irrelevant to other ones. However, if we left them out, it would be discrimination.
I think this is way too big for just a small group of persons; we need a bazaar style. The problem is that the Internet time is a lot faster than the real world's, i.e., more happens in a specific amount of time in the net than in the Real World. This is because the Net is composed from the lifes not of just a geographically close group, but from millions of people from around the world.
We would need some way of categorizing the facts. This would be hard. Some are time spans, some are specific dates, some are 'circa 1984'. We would also need to have lots and lots of subcategories, and some way to 'zoom in' from the less specific general timeline with only the most relevant facts to a very specific timeline with all the 1000+ events in a single week or in a specific but small topic in a larger period of time (like the dpkg history since Dec 1999).
To sum it up: you are nuts. We don't have enough diskspace. We would need the space of a Boeing-747 full of DVDs. (OK, I'm exagerating a bit, but not much). If we could do it, we would get lagged faster than you can say 'Benedict'.
Sorry if I got carried away, it's late. And if I mispelled something, it was on purpose.
Since various people have nominated sci-fi stories, I'd like to suggest a few more.
Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
I suggest the Bastard Operator From Hell stories also belong in Internet (or Computing) history documents. Without these true anecdotes from his life, thousands of network administrators would not be the power mad, paranoid freaks that they are.
[Take all the above with a pinch of salt]
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The whole point of Cathedral and The Bazaar was
that it was advocating not just _free_ s/w devel,
but _bazaar_mode_. This is NOT a GNU Idea.
Linux-kernel is bazaar mode, HURD is (was?) not.
EGCS bazzar is GCC was not.
My top pick for a document "which have profoundly affected computing and the Internet" (emphasis added) is Bill Gates' document, "An Open Letter to Hobbyists." According to the PBS film mentioned in a previous post ("triumph of the nerds") this was the first evangelization of proprietary software. Making it more meningful, it's written by the man who has profited the most by it.
As long as we're including the documents that we hope will define the internet in the future (GNU Manifesto, Open Source Definition, Debian Free Software Guidelines, etc.) we should also be careful to include the documents that made computing what it is today...
"Space exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." - Buzz Aldarin
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Threaded discussions exactly like we're having now on slashdot, graphics, commercial stuff.
BBSs were very important for awhile when the Internet was still academic based. Lots of things carried over.
Just another perl hacker in Bangkok
I agree totally with what you're saying... and it just hit me...
Once you refine that a bit, you're saying that the best collection of documents on the development of the Internet is the internet itself.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
> This is interesting but way too hypothetical and speculative; as you say, an unlikely scenario. Would not likelier scenarios be more interesting -- such as the fact the the continued use of the GPL disperses the power from the computing elite to computing newcomers, thus making computer technology have a more democratic basis? That is much more likely to happen and fortunately makes for a better society.
:-)
I'm obviously not the original AC here!
But anyways. Yes, I'm sure that is a more likely scenario, but empires fall most quickly when their leaders concentrate on the good and ignore the bad.
I'm not saying that the Open-Source/Free Software (OS/FS) movement is an empire, but the basic idea still applies. And when one is decentralized as much as we are, everyone is a leader, or at least a potential one.
If we only look at the future through the proverbial rose-coloured glasses, then if something unexpected happens, such as what our friendly neigbourhood AC has proposed, we are up shit creek without a paddle, so to speak.
The best offense is a good defense. If we at least consider all the things that could possibly "go wrong," rather than dismissing them offhand as "hypothetical and speculative," then if, horror of horrors, one of them does occur, we will be at least a bit prepared for it, and have some idea of what to do.
Maybe not a concrete plan, but better than nothing.
It is everyone's responsibility who wants to see the OS/FS movement succeed and blossom to at least consider unpleasant outcomes, no matter how unlikely. That way, if the unlikely becomes inevitable, we may have someone with an idea of how to head it off.
To ignore this is dangerous.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
-sunking
Rather than one of those dry historical anthologies, would it be better to base it on the collected real-life stories of Jon and the IETF? What are writings but a meeting of minds across space and time? When an author sits down and composes something, it's like having a conversation with a future soul. What is missing is the context, the idealism and passion of the times. Living during the French revolution is vastly different from reading about it. What would you want your peers to know about the celebration of the individual and challenge technical mastery?
:-)
Perhaps slashdot could keep an open archive for a few months to collect people's memories of the evolution of the internet, along with crystalised documents, with the aim of producing a cdcard (youanthologies know one of those shape CDs) to (yeah, cheesy but the rest of the population thinks a date is important) commemorate the new millenium?
We can then call it BE and AI for before and after internet
LL
We must preserve this piece of "cough" internet history.
o _car.html
http://www.tucson.com/hawp/ruth/humor/texts/jat
Have you checked out Zoid.com yet? Zoid.com
I'd beg to differ. Though I'd have to say that BSD is more relevant to the net itself (BIND anyone?), some of the best software that the net itself runs on is either BSDL or GPL.
One of the driving forces behind the orginal propogation of the net was it's freedom, in both Beer and Speech. Without these free licenses, I have no doubt that some other free license would be taking their place right now. But still, these are the free licenses that made the software that made the internet itself.
Remember, commercialization came to the Net, the net wasn't formed by commercialization. So free software itself is a major factor in the birth of the 'net. And if not in it's birth, then it's upbringing. I still follow the (somewhat dated) ideal that anything I want I should be able to find on the net for nothing, be it entertainment, operating systems, music, anything.
I don't know, the good folks at cDc are constantly saying that they published the first e-zine, since 1984 or something. Anyways, I had completely forgotten about it but the Hackers' Manifesto should be included. That's some powerful reading.
-gocubs
it's been a while since I read it, but isn't this what the jargon file does?--at least in a way--it mentions the important docs, and their significance, although the versions I have seen don't link to or contain the actual docs. This is what it was created for though.
Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.
just because gibson was first doesn't make him the God of cyberpunk, many of the ideas were there in earlier books, he just put them together--and Stephenson is not gibson for dummies--it is gibson off of the crack pipe
you know where I first remember hearing about a cell phone? Space Cadet by Robert Heinlien, writen in like 194?, 195? something
Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.
I think this is an excellent idea - if modified slightly. Only a historical perspective will truly show us what were the significant documents of the internet, but I think a nice repository of important, or at least interesting documents would be a Good Thing. I wouldn't mind working on this. I am thinking a collection of suggested/donated documents, very accessible, nicely formatted, and always growing. Sort of an ongoing archive of current thought and philosophy. If anyone else thinks this is a good idea, email your suggestions, documents, urls.... I build a page and start thinking about layout...
If we where to do this we would need to do this right. I don't think we can really choose what is of historical significance. To do this up right, we should ultimatly try and store every computer/internet related document we can find. Now I do think we can live without including the "Hey this is a picture of my computer" webpage. But honestly who is to make such a decision. I guess ultimatly a few indescriminatory measures could be used.
Web page hits: sound silly but the more people read any document how ever strange it is, the more that document has the potential to effect the internet as a whole. The frog in the blender for example.. ok bad example, as its not truly internet related but might as well be stored, for embarresment sake if anything. This would also cover many major documents like the Cathedral..
as many people have read it.
Legal documents: Any court rulings, congressional hearings/bills etc. that deal with the internet and its freedom.
RFCs: Request For Comments. DUH.
Histories: Histories and bibliographies on major companies (yes even microsoft) and people, that have had an effect on the internet. (This would be the tough one as it would call for some judgement, but he basic rule should be that if there is any even remote consideration for a person/company they should include them. I'm not saying that the group that stores these records should create such bibliographies, but if one exist, and there is any reason to believe that they/it had an effect upon the net, it should be included.
Free Submission: While ultimatly there needs to be a board or voting group (slashdot?? hehe) in control. All people should be able to submit documents. Such documents shold have a minimum of review. Look to see if the submission is of geniune intent, and store it.
I first saw the GNU Mainfesto by Richard Stallman in Dr. Dobbs' Journal in 1985 (I think) and I wrote Richard to see what I could do and got a letter back which just overwhelmed me with what he wanted to do. Overwhelmed in the sense that I sat on the sidelines because I didn't think I could do any of the things he listed. Write a compiler, recode UNIX utilities, create an operating system. I wasn't up to any of these. But I was caught up in the vision.
I'm glad there were many others caught up in the vision who were not overwhelmed and made the dream a reality. Would it have happened without the manifesto? I doubt it.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
Maybe its just cause I have a love for information and knowledge ;)
darkewolf
"That is not dead which can eternal lie...."
Nimheil
I would like to nominate a usenet message
from prof Andy Tanenbaum where he proclaims
that linux is obsolete.
I believe the news thread is still distributed
with every linux kernel src.
Tanenbaum had some valid points, but I guess
he did not forsee linux' huge succes.
Bram Stolk
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
I had completely forgotten about that book until I happened accross a badly abused copy last week that a coworker had brought in strictly for historical musement. That's the book that got me started so many years ago. I remember when the web was still called gopher. The excitement I got out of learning about the internet turned into a four years and running career for me.
Written back in 1993(!) as a master's thesis, it is, as far as I know, the *first* history of the net. Maybe you even read it in school; it's been downloaded thousands of times and translated into many languages. Here is a quote from the beginning:
"Why write a history of the Net? It's not enough to say merely that it's never been done.
The Net is a unique creation of human intelligence.
The Net is the first intelligent artificial organism.
The Net represents the growth of a new society within the old.
The Net represents a new model of governance.
The Net represents a threat to civil liberties.
The Net is the greatest free marketplace of ideas that has ever existed.
The Net is in imminent danger of extinction.
The Net is immortal. "
Check it out at The History of The Net.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
if "jacking in" is connecting to the net, what's the term for 'disconnecting'?
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
it telnet really a protocol? I thought it was just raw packets directly from the keyboard to the server, and back to the screen.
not really much of a protocol, actualy nither is HTTP, have you ever read the spec? its simple enough to run by hand, IE telnet directly into port 80 and type "GET / HTTP/1.0"....
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Hardware
Software
Early Computer Magazines
Conceptual
The first IMP installation thirty years ago is described in today's L.A. Times. Nobody took a picture of the start of the ARPANET.
Internet Overview
Technical History
Concept History
The version that I pointed to may be the latest version, which raises an interesting problem for historians. Because of the speed and ease of which documents can change on the internet, it is nearly impossible to find the "first edition" of a given document.
Of course a lot of the early RFCs fit the bill, but here's my nomination for one of the really significant documents that was not an RFC: the paper End-to-End Arguments in System Design. This paper laid out the basic principles that drove the design of most of the Internet protocols. One of the authors, Dave Clark, was the "Internet Architect" during the 80s when the basic protocols were designed and put in place.
If you can't read PDF, you can find the paper in several other formats at http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/ww w/publications/pubs.html
---glv
Maybe not so much about the internet, but I would have to put my vote behind the Tao of programming (it is hanging on my wall) This book/doc is a required reading for all incoming cs majors. Also, the Zen isn't bad either
"After three days without programming, life becoming meaning less"
just because gibson was first doesn't make him the God of cyberpunk
;-)
Actually, he wasn't first. Shockwave Rider (*grumblegrumble* still can't find a copy) beat him by 7(?) years, and was in turn behind Vinge, IIRC. But Gibson really defined the genre, albeit retroactively.
and Stephenson is not gibson for dummies--it is gibson off of the crack pipe
The crack pipe is part of the genre. The thing Stephenson is lacking is the punk. Sure the world of Snowcrash isn't nice, but it's a kind of shallow dystopia--all strip malls and suburbia (this is on purpose, of course; Snowcrash was supposed to be fairly light-hearted). In fact, everything is shallow: the characters, the plot, etc. Hiro is a generic hacker/warrior, Raven a generic tank, and the most interesting parts of the book are monologues about Sumerian culture and dated neuroscience. Some neat ideas (though not after I actually studied neuroscience) and stuff to steal for games, but it may as well have been a sourcebook for the Snowcrash world for all the story in it. All of this IMO, of course
you know where I first remember hearing about a cell phone? Space Cadet by Robert Heinlien, writen in like 194?, 195? something
How about Metropolis, 1927? Andriods, the 'plex, dystopia, etc. Very cyberpunk, esp. for a 72 year old German film.
Whether or not "the open source movement could blink out pretty quickly" there is no reason why we should not record our stories. The sharing and records of a culture are some of the most important ways to educate others about your history and to provide a key to the culture, just ask an anthropologist. For example, the Hacker's Dictionary is a great piece of history, written at a time when computers didn't even have close to the amount of influence they do now. Yet that document has helped me become acquainted with the spirit that was geeks of yore as well as informing me of its influence on hacker culture today.
It is actually even more important to record the history if it is so short-lived, as you claim is a possibility. If one believes in the ideals (I know this word is somewhat touchy, if you prefer insert purpose or fun or whatever else you want) of the open source movement that might die it would be useful to record a history so that others who believe in the same sorts of things will see what made this die.
Anyway, by the time that we 'know' our place in history and have 'perspective' it will be too late to do the recording of the history. This would be an important document in the history of the development of the internet, computing, etc.
joey
+-------+ between the wish and the thing lies the world - All the Pretty Horses
1) Is the document or site well known by a wide variety and large number of people related to the development and culture of the Internet? (e.g. Decl. of Ind. of Cyberspace)
2) Does the document or site provide insight to the development of the Internet, its technologies, and its culture? (e.g. CatB)
3) Did the document in some way influence, impact, or otherwise direct the development of some part of the Internet and/or its culture? (e.g. proposed Communications Decency Act)
4) Is the document or site particularly well-written, interesting, unique, "cool", or noteworthy in format, style, and/or appearance? (e.g. Slashdot's format)
5) Does the document or site address an issue or question that is as yet unresolved, or that deeply affects people and institutions beyond the Internet?
Are there others? Is this a realistic undertaking?
The definitive copy of John Perry's Declaration can be found at http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declar ation-Final.html.
I don't think cyberspace as Gibson visualized it in Neuromancer exists quite yet, and it certainly didn't back in the mid 80's when he wrote it. Books like this can be important because they act as points of inspiration for the folks who later make these ideas a reality. I'm reminded of how I once saw all of these NASA scientists and astronauts talking about how Star Trek sparked their interest in space when they were kids. Just as the novels of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells inspired earlier generations...
This may be overly simplistic thinking...
Seems to me like the documents produced by the W3C would be a good place to start. Standards are the backbone of how we present information on the internet. And this would also take into account that more significant documents are being developed all the time...
"Politicians always tell the truth, when they're calling each other liars."
Go browse the web for papers by Edsger Dijkstra, Donald Knuth, C.A.R. Hoare, etc.
In particular, see if you can't find Dijkstra's "Goto Considered Harmful". It's a classic.
The writings of these people, and others like them, are more useful and inspiring than those of even ESR or Richard Stallman, and all science fiction pales in comparison.
Jon
I nkow they might be a bit large to consider "a document", but all the published volumes of Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming". While probably not directly related to the Internet they still do contain a gold-mine of algorithims, programming techniques and analysis.
Grossman's Statement
I realize it isn't pleasant or happy document, but it was the basis of at least one legislative attempt (the Hyde Amendment to H.R. 1501) and basically sums up the absolute worst and most ignorant facet of the people governing us and how they view computing technology. Try not to read it on a full stomach.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Looking at this another way, the Internet is its own compendium of significant documents, arranged in order of significance to each person according to their own circumstances.
What you and I think is significant may not matter to someone else, so maybe even Joe's first crappy, error-ridden homepage is significant, as long as it is significant to Joe, because it adds to the Internet's strongest aspect: its universality.
To me, the thing that separates the Internet from FidoNet circa 1987, or a roomful of wonks talking IPX over Lantastic peer LAN, is mostly the fact that there are a couple bajillion people using it.
Among other things, the Internet helps feed people. The Internet helps diseminate information to topple repressive governments. The Internet keeps sex predators safely wanking off at home, and out of our houses. That's all mainly because there are many people in each case using the Internet to affect each of those scenarios.
So just by joining the crowd, we've every one of us contributed to the Internet, either as audience or as publisher, and often as both. We all helped make this worldwide network as significant as it is. Ultimately, the Internet mostly consists of us and our toys, doing significant good, significant harm, and lesser variations thereof.
So when documents such as CatB, the first mental germination of the IP spec, or the Communications Decency Act are thought of as the significant documents that shaped the Internet, I don't think that's the whole story. In fact, we are.
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
Geez, the first things that ever gave me an
/. ever came into being.
.sigs that
idea of the "shared consciousness" of the internet
were the various humorous brick-a-brack that
I found on wiretap.spies.com and the like.
Some of that material pre-dated anything I can
remember from my very first time on the internet,
in 1993.
The 100 question purity test was something even
my non-geek friends knew about after their
first year of college. And they knew where it
came from, too.
The original Mosaic start page.
Famous Spam (& other email crap)
------------
The ASCII cow drawings.
Neimun-Marcus Cookies recipie.
Craig Shergold and those damn cards.
etc.
------------
The GeekCode listing.
The jargon file.
The news.announce FAQs. The alt.sex FAQ
(all of MY friends read it).
USENET was the global community long before
web sites like
There must be dozens of long-lost threads out
there that should be included in such an archive.
Serdar Argeric? Kibo?
Sparring on the Scientology groups?
Linus' initial postings about Linux (an testament
to what the efforts of hundreds of programmers
working cooperatively can do, if nothing else).
The rec.humor.funny post that got USENET censored
at U.C.Berkeley. Briefly.
Posts from the Kremlin (kremvax IIRC) immediately
before the fall of the Soviet union -- since these
messages were literally the only information
that got out of the country at the time.
This may very well be the only time that the
internet has been the SOLE source of information
about an event of such global interest.
The announcement that AOLers would have free
access to the internet (mostly USENET at the
time, ie Black September).
The Warlord signature (people with
were excessively long got "warlord-ed". I know
I was, but then, I was trying)
The Starr Report (important for a number of
reasons, not the least of which being the degree
to which the lengthy report brought so MANY web
servers to their knees, even 6 years into the
"web age" of massive internet growth).
The sex story written by (can't remember the
name...) Jake Baker, the gentleman who was
arrested in Michigan for writing a story involving
the sexual torture of a classmate -- important
because it's the first time *I* can recall that
someone got in that type of legal trouble for
something written on the internet. And probably
where the internet's rep (independant of AOLs,
which I think suffers for different reasons) for
porn-related bad seeds.
How 'bout a representative cascade? (fun when
everbody had 80-column newsreaders!)
I can think of lots more, but these are things
that were either widely read and understood,
or things that shaped both the internet and
the outside world.
There was more on the internet than the GPL and
RFCs before the web.
--
Lutefisk.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Indirectly there is the "The Bell System Technical Journal / July-August 1978 (UNIX Time Sharing System)" :-)
I would have to argue RFC-822 (mail) and RFC-1036 (usenet) as being more important than the FTP RFC.
it's such a noble yet might project to try and document something of this nature, but would be pretty interesting. could contain info on the CDA and any related beltway forays into the net..
"The electric light is pure information"
-- jimmycarter
Agreed. Anything mainstream and famous enough to have made it into the appalling (but loveable) film 'Hackers' needs to go in there.
"Don't open the gates, who the hell needs a wooden horse that size?"
I'm happy to see that my question has generated so much discussion. A few thoughts:
Indeed, it may be too early to determine which documents profoundly shaped the internet. However, this makes our task far more important & daunting. What WILL happen in twenty, thirty years when historians try to assemble this anthology? Because information is so readily lost (data formats change, web servers disappear, a gem of a file is lost because of information glut), we must seek to preserve files (as many as we can, without going overboard, anyway) that will POTENTIALLY be important. This does not mean that we should create a database with every RFC, essay, piece of code, internet-related legislature, Slashdot posting, USENET posting, etc. on the web. No -- it instead means that we should make informed guesses as to what documents will be interesting (or important) to internet historians in the future.
Here's how I propose we could go about this:
Use a slashdot-style web site. Users would post a URL to a certain document, explaining why they think it has significance. This gets added to the database. Then other readers can visit this URL, read the tex, return to the original poster's message, and then comment on it and give it a score (eg., between one and ten). All documents submitted would be maintained in the database (unless they were clearly spam, trolls, etc.), but scores would be attached to them, making it easier in the future. Perhaps -- depending on drive space available, the URL should actually be mirrored (to prevent future 404s); or we could press CDs/DVDs with the full text of these documents.
The site would be an ongoing effort. If an older document is discovered in five years that has significance, add it.
Regardless of what this site would turn out, it would be an important step in preserving the creation stage of the internet.
Please reply (on Slashdot) to this message if anybody has the time/interest to implement such a site. It could be a group effort -- I propose that we create either a working mailing list or web-based message board in the interim (before THIS Slashdot article disappears into oblivion). However, I also propose that in order to prevent lots of Slashdotters from creating numerous "competing" mailing lists, you all should hold off on this until a few people have a chance reply to this posting with their thoughts.
-cf
I'd include "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll as
a historically significantly book in the (short) history of the internet, for several reasons. It's a glimpse of the relationship of the early Internet vs. the the real world (technically, legally, and personally). It presents the best documented case of early internet cracking. It's a slice of life (almost a diary) of a unix sysadmin from the early 80's.
Stoll's other book, "Silicon Snake Oil" should also be considered. I provokes the question "What will be the impact of the internet on the quality of life of the people who use it?"
(I hope most of you have read these).
Many people mention ESR's document, but I think the significance of it stands out most clearly in relation to Frederick Brooks "The Mythical Man Month." What did MMM say? Brooks' Law: adding manpower to a late project makes it later, invariably. What did CatB say? That open source systems such as Linux can create a way around Brook's Law!
Mentioning one without the other is to ignore the historical background & significance of the document. It's like talking about Newton's Principia Mathematica or Einstein's papers on relativity without understanding what a profound change in thinking these documents represented.
(Am I suggesting ESR is on the level of Newton & Einstein? Uhh, no but just to head that one off at the pass...)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Don't know links, but how about the first paper on public key encryption?
I'd be more interested in a broad set of interesting links about the internet, open source, and hacker culture rather than something too historical or self important. It would be a good place to point someone who was trying to find a clue or a good read.
Jim
There's a copy here
Carl Malamud was "the" pioneer of Internet Talk Radio and produce or presented some great programs for the archives:
The Geek of the Week program:
http://town.hall.org/radio/Geek
Hell's Bells, a radio history of telephone communications:
http://town.hall.org/radio/HellsBells
Also, although it is not available on the Internet, let us not forget Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg.
---HAM CALL -- KB7EXY---
http://www.levity.com/julian/bungle_vv.html
"A Rape in Cyberspace
How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a
Database Into a Society
By Julian Dibbell
(© 1993, first published in The Village Voice, December 23, 1993)"
While Gibson provides a look at a society almost entirely shaped by information (even the extremely short "Burning Chrome" was pretty much the same stuff), Gibson understands how the internet will probably work in the far future (except who writes code for all those fruit looped coloured hacker toys?)...
Stephenson is a watered down Gibson (Gibson for Dummies). He still get the info flow though, and has a rather far fetched view of technology playing with people. Snowcrash was plausible, kind of a humanitarian evolution of technology, and The Diamond Age furthers the same ideas. (I haven't gotten Zodiac or found a cheap Cryptomicron, I am not paying $20.00 for a book!).
So anyway, grab a boxed set from these guys (or make it yourself, dammit! ) and strap them into that time capsule Slashdot is putting together (or are they playing with our minds, yet again!?).
;)
--Josh
"If it is broken, fix it. If it is fixed, improve upon it. This becomes one helluva cycle."
Do books count?
Neuromancer by William Gibson introduced the idea of jacking in to the net before "surfing" was even a term. (I'm sure someone will flame me saying that author [Foo] did it first, but Gibson popularized the idea.)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson introduced avatars in the technical sense, and refined many of the concepts that Gibson started.
I think both books have been very influential in giving geeks a shared vision of where we want to take the net.
--Twid
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
Books of interest to the cyber-punk :-
see this URL ( and others )
http://www.lysator.liu.se/etexts/hacker/
an interesting if now historical work on the internet BEFORE the web and its "criminal" fringes (?).
Also I think an interesting idea in and of itself. Literary freeware.
You'd have to include the GPL. gcc anyone?
point of fact: the Internet predates both of those books by quite some time, AFAIK.
I think a number of current sites might be interested in hosting something like this, companies like "Slashdot.org" or "ZDNet". I'm sure many would like to keep this with the people, but it's worthwhile to think of these other options as they have the time and resources to make a seriouse attempt at this, and manage the content. Also they have a large audience allready established that would contribute.
... Mainframe
I think this is an extremely worth while project and would love to see it take shape.
Best of luck
http://gnu.cetcol.net.co/gnu/manifesto.html
I think it's very, very hard to not include Gibson's Neuromancer. It may not be 100% original, Stephenson may or may not be better, but Gibson's the one who got read and sold books. Neuromancer is, in my opinion, just about the most important novel of the last 20 years, let alone just Internet-related.
Also, Bruce Sterling's magnificent Hacker Crackdown. It brilliantly depicts the first few years when the hacker culture went from phreak-centric to Internet-centric...and it's one of the first significant books of modern times to be released free on the 'net. =)
I can't believe that no-one so far has nominated Travels With Samantha http://photo.net/samantha/travels-with-samantha.ht ml which was certainly one of the first interesting reads out on the web (as distinguish from the net). It may even have been the first internet published book that was later published as a dead-trees book.
When people started to realize that the web was a publishing mechanism it was because of this book.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu/sean/ declaration.html
ufdraco