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Not sure if the author of this piece actually witnessed what the Internet was like without the WWW. Or, more specifically, without NCSA Mosaic, which really jum

Not sure if the author of this piece actually witnessed what the Internet was like without the WWW. Or, more specifically, without NCSA Mosaic, which really jumpstarted the WWW. My experience back then was that the Internet did grow exponentially even when the WWW was not yet popular. Much faster than Compuserve and others. Also, the allegation that Linux wouldn't have happened is bogus since development of Linux actually started way before 1993/94 (when NCSA Mosaic made the Web popular).

yuhong 15y ago
>Or, more specifically, without NCSA Mosaic, which really jumpstarted the WWW. It also harmed HTML too. For example, originally HTML was not based on SGML. But Dan Connolly decided it should be based on SGML in 1992. Sadly for them, Mosaic was released next year, which was also not fully compliant with SGML.
gwern 15y ago
I think Eric S. Raymond witnessed the pre-WWW Internet.
- mikecane 15y ago
  So did I. And I Commented and I think his essay is a parlor game. Amusing, annoying, but not to be taken seriously.
  - shareme 15y ago
    why not to be taken seriously? There was a movement by AT&T to block research and implementation of internet or have you forgotten. In fact they wanted the infrastructure done their way not decentralized, etc. Than there was FIdonet, etc.
    - mechanical_fish 15y ago
      Because time does not go backwards? The problem with counterfactual history is that history is nonlinear: The things which do happen affect the things that don't. In particular, it is very hard to write the future history of things that were squelched by larger forces before they could grow big. Squelched things are obscure. They are hard to research. It's hard enough to write an actual early history of, say, Apple -- much of it was witnessed only by a handful of people, and memory is fallible, and lots of traditions have obscure beginnings -- but how do you write the future history of the company that Steve Jobs would have started if Woz had decided to remain at H-P? It's like trying to predict hurricanes by tracking all the butterflies.
    - mikecane 15y ago
      Look, by being here you should understand one basic thing: What big companies do doesn't matter in terms of what society wants done. Successful companies ride the wave of society, not dictate. Dictators don't last. Any AT&T interference wouldn't have mattered. It's like saying IBM could have stopped personal computing.
mpk 15y ago
The Internet was alive and well before the web came along. It was certainly a different beast at the time but the author is spot-on when observing that the distributed, anarchic nature of ARPANET lies at its foundation. There is also an alternate scenario that might be interesting to speculate about. Before wide-spread internet availability a lot of people were connecting to (mostly) privately run BBSes. Inter-BBS networks like FIDONET were developed for passing email between FIDONET nodes with gateways into other systems (including, IIRC the internet). In a world without ARPNET based internet it's not hard to imagine commercial services being built around this. Given enough volume these services would start setting up dedicated links to each other. Enough services start doing this and it makes sense to set up exchange points. All these services rely on the same protocol to communicate over exchange points and that would make proprietary protocol changes difficult so a more-or-less open engineering consortium would be the next logical step to push such changes. Real time communication over this network would be a real commercial selling point (hello chat systems!) so next thing you know you have 'special' emails with high priority and some extra flags that don't end up in email boxes but are sent to end-user programs that only send and receive the 'special' emails. (Hey there protocol selection!). This wouldn't get us the web any time soon (this kind of network wouldn't have room for arbitrary data floating around), but market forces + social momentum could conceivably build an alternative version of a global data communication network.
deleted 15y ago
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yuhong 15y ago

>Or, more specifically, without NCSA Mosaic, which really jumpstarted the WWW. It also harmed HTML too. For example, originally HTML was not based on SGML. But Dan Connolly decided it should be based on SGML in 1992. Sadly for them, Mosaic was released next year, which was also not fully compliant with SGML.

gwern 15y ago

I think Eric S. Raymond witnessed the pre-WWW Internet.

mikecane 15y ago
So did I. And I Commented and I think his essay is a parlor game. Amusing, annoying, but not to be taken seriously.
- shareme 15y ago
  why not to be taken seriously? There was a movement by AT&T to block research and implementation of internet or have you forgotten. In fact they wanted the infrastructure done their way not decentralized, etc. Than there was FIdonet, etc.
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    Because time does not go backwards? The problem with counterfactual history is that history is nonlinear: The things which do happen affect the things that don't. In particular, it is very hard to write the future history of things that were squelched by larger forces before they could grow big. Squelched things are obscure. They are hard to research. It's hard enough to write an actual early history of, say, Apple -- much of it was witnessed only by a handful of people, and memory is fallible, and lots of traditions have obscure beginnings -- but how do you write the future history of the company that Steve Jobs would have started if Woz had decided to remain at H-P? It's like trying to predict hurricanes by tracking all the butterflies.
  - mikecane 15y ago
    Look, by being here you should understand one basic thing: What big companies do doesn't matter in terms of what society wants done. Successful companies ride the wave of society, not dictate. Dictators don't last. Any AT&T interference wouldn't have mattered. It's like saying IBM could have stopped personal computing.

mpk 15y ago

The Internet was alive and well before the web came along. It was certainly a different beast at the time but the author is spot-on when observing that the distributed, anarchic nature of ARPANET lies at its foundation. There is also an alternate scenario that might be interesting to speculate about. Before wide-spread internet availability a lot of people were connecting to (mostly) privately run BBSes. Inter-BBS networks like FIDONET were developed for passing email between FIDONET nodes with gateways into other systems (including, IIRC the internet). In a world without ARPNET based internet it's not hard to imagine commercial services being built around this. Given enough volume these services would start setting up dedicated links to each other. Enough services start doing this and it makes sense to set up exchange points. All these services rely on the same protocol to communicate over exchange points and that would make proprietary protocol changes difficult so a more-or-less open engineering consortium would be the next logical step to push such changes. Real time communication over this network would be a real commercial selling point (hello chat systems!) so next thing you know you have 'special' emails with high priority and some extra flags that don't end up in email boxes but are sent to end-user programs that only send and receive the 'special' emails. (Hey there protocol selection!). This wouldn't get us the web any time soon (this kind of network wouldn't have room for arbitrary data floating around), but market forces + social momentum could conceivably build an alternative version of a global data communication network.

deleted 15y ago

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