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A lot of discussion of early web technologies, like MOSAIC and HTML, took place in newsgroups that are still recorded and displayed online. Not sure I've seen

A lot of discussion of early web technologies, like MOSAIC and HTML, took place in newsgroups that are still recorded and displayed online. Not sure I've seen protocol discussions there (just never bothered to look) but it shows a whole lot of academics and government employees in the mix, and some commercial actors as well. It's disappointing since those programs succeeded beyond the dreams of avarice but were not designed to gather publicity. The fact that so much of our economic growth is undergirded by public research funding is forgotten even by direct beneficiaries.

dredmorbius 7y ago
I was going to suggest the IETF and RFCs as a trove of standards-setting activity. There should be a few other similar ones. There's an interesting transition as those groups moved from small (able to fit into a VW Bug, bus, or small bar) to large (auditorium, or multi-campus groups), and the relative frictions in new developments. Past a certain scale, the easiest way to change a standard is to move forward, either abandoning or ignoring backwards compatibility. Both software languages and various social networking protocols (there are ... many) are interesting cases in point. Mastodon is in many ways IRC v. 2.0 (and there are any number of competing contenders). There actually was (and/or is, depending on your judging criteria) a Usenet II, though it's seen limited popularity. Another good source on much of this would be the late Pieter Hintjins. See for example: https://mixitconf.org/en/blog/messaging---social-architecture-by-pieter-hintjens https://mixitconf.org/en/blog/messaging---social-architectur...
robin_reala 7y ago
I did a talk a few years ago on the history of layout in CSS, and those newsgroups were an invaluable source of information for why decisions were made.
saurik 7y ago
> A lot of discussion of early web technologies, like MOSAIC and HTML, took place in newsgroups that are still recorded and displayed online. Which is why I'm devastated how much new conversation about how things are put together is generally not hosted by the organizations involved, but is stored places like issues on Google Code (all gone), SourceForge (increasingly difficult and likely will begone), GitHub (which people don't seem to like to believe will one day delete their data); imagine if some of these early standardization efforts had done all of their communication on Internet protocols using the contemporary equivalent of Yahoo Groups or Google+--maybe using CompuServe or AOL?--and all of that work was now only around due to haphazard archiving efforts. (Google+ really burns me, as there was so much discussion of how things in the Android ecosystem works--particularly among all of the third-party forks, such as CyanogenMod--which is now just deleted and gone :/.)
- bbanyc 7y ago
  And Google Groups, which had a truly wonderful searchable Usenet archive (inherited from DejaNews), but several redesigns later is nearly useless. Though given how many people have old Usenet postings they'd like to forget, maybe it's not that bad.

dredmorbius 7y ago

I was going to suggest the IETF and RFCs as a trove of standards-setting activity. There should be a few other similar ones. There's an interesting transition as those groups moved from small (able to fit into a VW Bug, bus, or small bar) to large (auditorium, or multi-campus groups), and the relative frictions in new developments. Past a certain scale, the easiest way to change a standard is to move forward, either abandoning or ignoring backwards compatibility. Both software languages and various social networking protocols (there are ... many) are interesting cases in point. Mastodon is in many ways IRC v. 2.0 (and there are any number of competing contenders). There actually was (and/or is, depending on your judging criteria) a Usenet II, though it's seen limited popularity. Another good source on much of this would be the late Pieter Hintjins. See for example: https://mixitconf.org/en/blog/messaging---social-architecture-by-pieter-hintjens https://mixitconf.org/en/blog/messaging---social-architectur...

robin_reala 7y ago

I did a talk a few years ago on the history of layout in CSS, and those newsgroups were an invaluable source of information for why decisions were made.

saurik 7y ago

> A lot of discussion of early web technologies, like MOSAIC and HTML, took place in newsgroups that are still recorded and displayed online. Which is why I'm devastated how much new conversation about how things are put together is generally not hosted by the organizations involved, but is stored places like issues on Google Code (all gone), SourceForge (increasingly difficult and likely will begone), GitHub (which people don't seem to like to believe will one day delete their data); imagine if some of these early standardization efforts had done all of their communication on Internet protocols using the contemporary equivalent of Yahoo Groups or Google+--maybe using CompuServe or AOL?--and all of that work was now only around due to haphazard archiving efforts. (Google+ really burns me, as there was so much discussion of how things in the Android ecosystem works--particularly among all of the third-party forks, such as CyanogenMod--which is now just deleted and gone :/.)

bbanyc 7y ago
And Google Groups, which had a truly wonderful searchable Usenet archive (inherited from DejaNews), but several redesigns later is nearly useless. Though given how many people have old Usenet postings they'd like to forget, maybe it's not that bad.