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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?"
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!
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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.
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Open mind, insert foot.
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.
But then, I'm prejudiced where the OSD is concerned :-)
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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")
Habitat didn't happen, but Q-Link did release a horrible thing called "Club Caribe" where you could wander around and gamble and buy stuff (like new heads for your avatar.) A bug in the software allowed for the fairly disturbing phenomenon of people being able to come up and take your head if you made the mistake of taking it off for some reason (like... you could was reason enough for me.)
I guess Club Caribe went away when Q-Link did. The last I remember seeing it was some time in 1988, but I don't remember when Q-Link finally pulled the plug.
Was it immersive? Nope. Was it 3-d? Nope. But it was an electronic alternate universe where you could be represented as you liked by a computer alterego.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"A horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms"
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
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.
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.
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"
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.
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)
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The ASCII cow drawings.
Neimun-Marcus Cookies recipie.
Craig Shergold and those damn cards.
etc.
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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
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu/sean/ declaration.html
ufdraco