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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?"
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!
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 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.
Internet Overview
Technical History
Concept History
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?
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
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu/sean/ declaration.html
ufdraco