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Beneath the Surface of the World Wide Web
This one was sent in byAnt: a rather charming timeline-style history of the World Wide Web from 1989 to the present at W3history.org . It's full of both well-known and little-known facts. Read it in English or German, your choice.
3
So, a history of the WWW from 1989 to the pseudo-present.
In ancient Swahili, 4 corresponds to the disporadic cycle and is thus tabooed in every day society.
42. I win!
Why woould you say Windows is a better desktop?(this is not a troll, please no flame war) I Just want to know why you believe that.
Ah, the irony.
Can't get in with IE 5.0 either, even thought it says it supports it!!!
...the bastards! 8-(
If I can't view it with KDE's file manager browser, I just
figure the page was shit to begin with.
M...
Before entering our site:
1.) "Upgrade" to a shitty browser.
2.) Enable a protocol that makes your machine
a demographic whore.
If a site can't make it past my junkbuster
proxy, or requires some bullshit plugin or protocol, I just don't read it.
Too many times, I've gone through the trouble
of disabling the proxy and enabling some crap
just to discover the site sucked anyway.
Here's a more accurate history of the internet:
From good to bad. The End.
It's about the Web, not about the Internet.
(Anyway, I could not see it because I don't use
JavaScript.)
Amen. I can't fathom how somebody would presume to be qualified to design a site about the history of the World Wide Web -- and design it such that it can't even be viewed with Lynx.
Support for other browsers will be added.
Please bear with us - and come back soon!
Kudos to the creators, my ass.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
I tried to see the page with Mozilla M12, and it said I need either NS 3.x/4.x or Redmondian equivalent of thereof.
So... in order to view the site, I need a historical browser, instead of a browser of the future!
It's probably just a PR stunt. You know, they probably thought that people come in and just think "damn, another boring museum site!"... and in order to make you to feel the thrills of history and probably nostalgia - to see in what kind of hell the people of yesterday needed to browse the web in, they want you to downgrade!
Good marketing! =)
I tend to agree with the earlier poster that said you can't keep up, though really you can't keep up in history regardless....unless you severly narrow the topic so far that the only people that would then care are PhDs. in the field.......
Sounds like something that would be neat to look at, just as long as the mass media and the general public don't read through it and think that becasue they see the word Apache they should invest their life savings in a company called BuildYourOwnWebServerToPutOnTheMoon.com who just IPO'd and jumped into record territory.
Funny and I thought Perl == Paid employment recently located
After accessing both the webhistory pages by the
Too many times I find that people likes to "play" with history - that is, they only tell _their_ side of history, and that _their_ version of history supposed to be the one and only valid version - and I do find it disheartening that we have allowed to many history-revisionists to "DO" history for us.
What is more disheartening is this kind of act is happening on the Net. I mean, look at MS's version... I would not want to discount IE's contribution to the popularity of the Web, but c'mon, IE is not the one and only thing going on.
But then, who should we blame but ourselves, by allowing the history revisionists to run amok?
Hopefully, one day, we will have a better way to keep a closer tab on those history revisionists, aka, "History Keepers", and if we find _any_ funny doings, we ought to have the means to make sure TRUE (and hopefully better unbiased versions of) history will eventually prevail.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
here's an other history/timeline i found while recently searching for digital subscriber line info...
this timeline of 'of Hypertext History' spans the past five thousand years... and apparently hasn't been update in a while but i find it interesting despite this...
http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/timeline.html
-ration8
the biggest thing Linux has done so far for the web is make web servers a commodity - run on cheap, commercial hardware, and do it well. That's a major accomplishment but it doesn't show in any of the server statistics.. yet.
Linux is more a social phenomenon than a technical one - most of what linux does other OS' do better - Windows is a better desktop, Solaris / FreeBSD is a better server, BeOS is more multimedia... Linux tries to do all things, but it has succeeded in doing nothing perfectly yet.
If you want to give linux credit - give it credit for the social phenomenon in the form of the open source / free software duality.
Great timeline, but it's all wrong! Here's the right one:
1999 - Al Gore invents internet
2000 - World ends.
Pretty nicely designed page, kudos to the creators.
:)
Its interesting to see that the first versions of Mosaic were only available for unix - this allowed many hobbyists, such as myself, a window onto this new world, while alot of people (windows people, still using Win3.1 at the time, and probably more still still using DOS) were left out. Boy how times have changed - with linux/unix people being left out of the internet with the use of proprietary protocols and native binaries (phear activeX).
Now we're coming full circle. Unix grew up with the internet in the beginning, anb the internet gave free Unixes (*BSD, Linux) life. It was quite fitting that Mosaic was only unix at the time. Now we've come back to popularizing unix/Linux via the net. Hopefully it will culminate in unix dominating the net once again.
One thing that is missing in this timeline is the milestones of Linux and the *BSDs that follow along side Netscape/Mosaic. Remember the internet was run overwhelmingly on Unix (and some VMS) and the behind the scenes of the web were the servers - overwhelmingly run on unix. NCSA and Cern were unix only, and of course Apache grew out of NCSA as we all know. It wasn even available for Windows until a few years ago, and it has dominated the web server arena since soon after its creation.
THe fact that most tools for the back end of the web were for Unix and that Linux was around, and free, and you got all the source code is extremely important in the ISP area which got everyone online. I dont even know if there's really an ISP I've ever heard of that did ALL of its operations ONLY on M$ products. The fact that Unix was behind the scenes for most of the net, which is where the web lives is something pretty major to overlook.
The number of ISPs that grew up on Linux and *BSD only is HUGE, and they contributed to the web's growth and development hugely by throwing so many users online. (Perhaps us oldskulers ('87 for me ) should curse them?
Math
It came up just fine, although slow. It's 19 hops away from me, so that could be a reason...
Hopefully it will culminate in unix dominating the net once again.
So you figure in a few years we'll be listening to users of Windows, PalmOS, BeOS, etc. bitch about all the web sites that are optimized for Konqueror/depend on ELF binaries/whatever, and whine about the Web discriminating against users of non-Unix platforms?
I surely hope not. First of all, because Unix sucks. It does. I'm not joking. Of course, it sucks much less than any given flavour of Windows. But it sucks nonetheless. Again, I'm serious: Unix is at best useable, and still nowhere near being worthy of the adjective "good". So in one way or the other, forcing people to use Unix if they want to have the complete Net experience is about as bad as doing the same with Windows.
What we want is not a Net dominated by Unix. It's an open Net, free of platform boundaries. Bitch as much as you want about Java (I know I do), it's definitely a step in the right direction. So I hope that in a few years an user can access any piece of information he wants, whether he's on a Beowulf cluster, on a workstation, or on an Internet-enabled toaster.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
the Web is moving faster than anyone can keep up. So you can never have a total history.
This is true regardless of the area you are trying to chronicle. There are 6E9 people in the world right now. A chronicle of any individual life would fill bookshelves. Any abstraction of these lives is limited. If you choose to limit your abstractio to a certain small area (like the technology of the WWW), you are obviously missing WAY more than you are including. All knowedge is incomplete.
Pure bullshit!
According to the counter at leb.net (please refer to a posting on slashdot around april 1999) Linux accounts for 31% of all servers "running the Internet" (WWW, FTP and News). Linux is the number one operating system right now. Linux plus FreeBSD account for more than half of all servers... what should I tell more?
I remember when in 1994 70% of all Webservers were run on Sun-boxes, the rest was HP-UX, SGI, AIX and e few others. MS-Windows wasn't even on the horizon back then.
Please ask again: who wrote the Internet history?
Unix = Internet: Sun some years ago, Linux today.
ms
moo
-- If I were a fish, I'd be wet
This is nice, but the problem is that the Web is moving faster than anyone can keep up.
So you can never have a total history.
We can only see and remember the biggest things that happen.
It won't work, even if I specifically check "Identify as Mozilla 3.0".
Doesn't work with Mozilla M12, either.
Does it contain the first occurrance of the slashdot effect?
For those who care (anyone? anyone?) there is a Microsoft Web history linked from their main page. Aww, isn't that special...
No Laughing Allowed!
So I finally get through to the site, only to be told to download Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. I guess the history of the Web includes the exclusion of alternatives to bloatware.
No Laughing Allowed!
It's nice to see that he's got a good sense of humour. Linus v2.0 :)
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
% telnet www.w3history.org 80
Trying 151.196.211.136...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
Windows is the best desktop?
Maybe you should check out the MacOS, which has had many of the features of the windows desktop for several years.
The MacOS, especially under MacOS 8+ provides a much better desktop environment than either windows, GNOME or KDE. Microsoft's big problem is (still) their complete failure to understand user interface design, something that Apple's designers have had down pat for years (close boxes on the left side of the window, anyone?)
I'm not trying to evangelise the Macintosh here, but I have used GNOME, KDE, Windows (3x and 4x) and the MacOS and the one I find the most usable has always been the MacOS.
I really couldn't care less about how stable it is, my Mac hardly ever crashes if I'm not trying to be stupid (ie running lots of extensions, old applications etc, which are the major causes of Macintosh instability.) And virtual memory can go shove itself for all I care...
For those interested, I have a Macintosh Centris 660av, and an Intel Pentium 100-based system running Red Hat 6, with KDE as my desktop (GNOME sucks ass IMHO)
'Bring out the GIMP'
life is a canvas/and the paint is hope and promise/the world is ours/no one can ever take it from us.
Let's see-- they forgot
Prospero
Gopher
comp.archives (thanks Ed Vielmetti!)
WAIS (Brenden Kehoe)
Usenet in general
WHOIS
Anything else anyone can think of?
Does anybody know of a site that is more than just screen shots or timelines of the web that you can explore 'historic' sites?
Yes! They have it right! A big page with "Loading - please wait..." appears, and for a long, long time, nothing happens. Now that's a good history of the World Wide Web.
This site really bugged me. First, they decide to use IE and NS to the exclusion of EVERY OTHER BROWSER. Sigh. And god knows we need JavaScript to do everything (Hey! Why not make a it a self-installing Windows program and be done with it?). Nearly every other site manages to present their content in an appealing way without excluding the little guys.
Right now, as we speak, I'm typing this message on my BeOS computer, as my Windows computer with Opera, IE, and NS defrags itself, so, uhm, even if I downloaded both of those browsers, it wouldn't make much of a difference.
Bleh.
If you don't already, start taking snapshots of your site every week or month or whatever it takes to record its evolution. I have a series of screen shots of the lotus.com home page (my previous employer) from early in 94 when they first got on the Web through several major revisions into late this year -- and you can almost sense the changes happening on the rest of the Web as it evolves from text on a gray background, to an overly heavy graphic page, to a news-style page, to its current format. BTW I can't get to the link in this story right now, either... go /.! A .sig free post.
Lurking peacefully since 1997
And all I needed was frame and Javascript support :-)
I guess simple HTML compliancy is a little passé these days.
Shouldn't there be a system with Network Solutions (who are generally very keen on blocking sites when controversy strikes) to de-register cool domain names when operated by the clueless?
(Oh, oh, oh ... was that end-of-year sarcasm? :-)
Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim