Slashdot Mirror
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.
Yeah, isn't that sad? "Presentation is more important than content. Screw you if you're blind." This is not the Web the way Tim wanted it. A lot of great features of HTML and HTTP have gone unused because webmasters care only about their sites looking pretty. Interoperability, link maintenance, etc. are seldom considered. (At least W3History does make use of content language negotiation; some multilingual sites don't even bother to do that.)
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
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.
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!
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?
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.