7 ms·

30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

226 points by telesilla 5y ago

heresie-dabord 5y ago
> Our vision is for a World Wide Web that is more inclusive, and more respectful of its users: a Web that supports truth better than falsehood, people more than profits, humanity rather than hate. I support the principles, but I can't give the real implementation a passing grade.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  It's popular for liberals to say things like "truth better than falsehood" but they really mean that they want to be able to control what other people read. Only half of what they think is true at a given time actually is. The other half of the equation is that the more well monied get their message out better than the unmonied. You can't use technology to fix that. Most of the conspiracies we deplore are advanced by idiots with money.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > It's popular for liberals to say things like "truth better than falsehood" but they really mean that they want to be able to control what other people read. Can you conceive of a world, or even just one person, who could say "truth better than falsehood" and actually mean it? > The other half of the equation is that the more well monied get their message out better than the unmonied. There's a mixed record on this, really. Yes, massive but subtle spending can result in deep and wide dispersion of a "message". But then there's Rebecca Black and "Friday", too.
BrianOnHN 5y ago
Melancholy. So young but so old. Wandering without direction. Waking up. Will there be a spinoff? Something to bring meaning?
- laurent92 5y ago
  The previous Kondratiev cycles were: - Steam engine (1825) - Electrical engineering and chemistry (1913) - Automobile (1950) - Computers… and even that could be split between the database era (1980), the web era (2000), and the AI era (2030?). For each cycle, it starts like wild competition, and ends with installed actors. Who would think of being the small guy who topples Ford by reinventing automobile today? No-one. There is no going back: Automobile has no “meaning”, just usages. All of this just makes society go faster. The only meaning in life is participating to the economy, family, and raising people from poverty.
  - tpmx 5y ago
    Computers: scientific computing era (1950), business computing era (1960), personal computing era (1980), web era (1995), mobile computing era (2005), social networking era (2010), ML/AI era (2020)
laurent92 5y ago
I’m more impressed that the first smartphone is only 14 years old and it has changed so much to our lives: - First, it developed the usage of superficial socialization (lifestyle show-off, body photos, up to lewd behaviors or prostitution, depression for a lot of people, massive societal dopamine addiction), - Second, Youtube was the world wild web of all politics and militant movements, - We’re in a third phase where most of it is under control, not tight but clearly guided, with many people doubting the accuracy of both sides. The phase of defiance. 3 phases (in my opinion) in just a few years, each of them responsible for negative societal shifts (from democratized prostitution to the invasion of Congress), and also positive ones (tech progress, political progress too, to be honest). Who knows what’s next?
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
  That comparison - the smartphone being 14 and the web being 30 really illustrates what a total warp jump it has all been. 15 years from boxy home computers connected to each other, to glowing high resolution pocket computer slabs. And then 15 years from those slabs being something totally new and revolutionary, to literally 50%* of all humans having them on their person at all times. The acceleration has definitely come with a lot of turbulence. If this acceleration is exponential, then what's next is a whole lot more turbulence. (Edit:*originally wrote 80% - I thought it would be higher at this point!)
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > to literally 80% of all humans having them on their person at all times. While the number is high, it's not _that_ high (closer to 50%), at least from the sources I could find[1]. Where are you getting the 80% from? - [1] - https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w... - check the references in the bottom for digging deeper
    - scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
      Sorry, I didn't fact check or anything, point was just that they're commonplace, routine, cheap etc. Just a number I had in my head for some reason.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
vr46 5y ago
Personal observation: heck I’m old. General observation: this is the most brilliant invention of my lifetime, and has realized the information revolution, enabled countless humans to teach themselves and each other, and shown us a myriad of truths about ourselves. A++
echelon 5y ago
The WWW was pretty great at age 10, but took a wrong turn in its teen years. We now do signal amplification of the worst of humanity. The giants are walled gardens, and in another 10-15 years the "web" will be subsumed by Facebook, and Google's "Cromification/AMPlification" (content lives on their servers and there is no URL bar.) We've destroyed much of the quirkiness and novelty. Now instead of sharing content and news p2p, it flows from centralized behemoths that choose for us. RIP personal websites, RSS, IRC, and bittorrent. They still exist, just as shells of their former lives. Their promise sucked away. It's not like the rest of tech fared much better. You can't even run your own software on half of the devices out there now. Or replace their batteries. Or trust them not to spy on you.
- goalieca 5y ago
  The technology is just too tempting for totalitarians and tyrants of all degrees. It feels like humanity itself is in some sort of societal infancy.
- pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
  > The WWW was pretty great [...] We now do signal amplification of the worst of humanity Aren't non-Web ("anti-Web"?) platforms the greatest driver of this? You mention IRC and bittorrent. Nothing really Web about those, either. Are you thinking of WWW and The Internet as being interchangeable terms? Isn't this just a generic and vague luddite-doomer rant?
- codegeek 5y ago
  I would focus on the overall positives at least in this thread. Yes there are lot of valid criticisms but that is more on the companies and not WWW in itself. WWW is Free, Open and you can do anything you want with it even today. You mention personal websites. No one is stopping you from getting a cheap server and setting up your personal website. In fact, I would argue it is has become easier to do that with so many cheap and reliable options (.e.g DigitalOcean, Vultr etc). I run my personal website using WordPress (another great invention) and I am free to host it however I want.
  - 5y ago
barosl 5y ago
It makes me feel strange to think that all these industries, all these jobs, and all these companies didn't exist just 30 years ago. Nowadays everyone says the web. It seems very hard to predict what technology will be dominant in another 30 years. It is fortunate that I will probably still live by then to witness the future. Anyway, congratulations to the web.
- legrande 5y ago
  > It seems very hard to predict what technology will be dominant in another 30 years The web seems to have bootstrapped entire industries who rely on its infra to operate. This will be the same story in the next 20 years. The web is the foundation, the innovation you will see, will piggyback on top of it, unless something else serves as the underlying basis (cough blockchain).
struct 5y ago
It's great that the web is so durable and long-lived, but I wonder about the health of it - it's got so complicated that we're down to only three implementations (Firefox, Chromium, WebKit), no realistic possibility of a new engine emerging, and essentially one implementation defining the standard. I wonder where we'll be in another 30 years?
- tpmx 5y ago
  This is the greatest crime against the web, IMO. The growing complexity for the past decade has been driven almost entirely by Google. I'm now pretty convinced they did it as a part of an explicit strategy. It's so insidious - on the one hand they are improving the web, on the other hand, the complexity they are driving makes the web more vulnerable.
  - samatman 5y ago
    > they did it as a part of an explicit strategy Yep. First they embraced the browser by building some nice shiny, er, Chrome on top of WebKit. Then, they proceeded to extend it, and extend it, and extend it. While paying Mozilla to stay in business, to avoid antitrust attention. Now they've very nearly extinguished the other engines. What can I say, they learned from the best.
- JiNCMG 5y ago
  It's always like this until the next new thing. The big guys will control everything until something new comes around that they don't want to implement. It will be a bit harder because you have the Web Browser which is a lot flexible than the old AOL Clients. Also WebKit is available publicly for any one to fork and create a new service. When modems were available for residential use, BBSes were the gateway and slowly were killed by the big guys (AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy) but what these big guys refused to do is work together to allow further communications with people outside of their networks. It took kids coming out of college and wanting to keep their internet access for email, ftp, talk, usenet, gopher and http. They started to partner with universities and offer TCP/IP (over PPP) access for $20. Local BBS started to open gateways to allow it's users to send/receive SMTP emails. By the time the big guys realized they were at a disadvantage, they started to offer communications between AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy, At first charging their users extra fees, some plans made it like SMS and were charging per message. Eventually users where just using their clients to get to the internet and that service dies. Most of those small internet providers were purchased by bigger companies. What will need to change now to kick the big guys (Verizon, Google, Apple, etc...) in the balls again? The tech is so regulated that I doubt we will see anything new as far and networking. In NYC WiMax was hobbled by the communication companies like Verizon TimeWarner and RCN.
flenserboy 5y ago
A guy I went to college with was there for the birth of the web. I remember him coming back that Fall, and him showing me, on one of our campus NeXTs, this new "World Wide Web" thing. "Cool, I guess. It's like Hypercard," I said, "but not as capable — but it is networked...so how is this better than Gopher? What's the use case?" "Just wait," he replied, "you can't build on Gopher like you can on this." Times changed quickly.
- _red 5y ago
  >our campus NeXTs, this new "World Wide Web" thing Similar story. My lab had 2 NeXT cubes (the monochrome version) and the first time I saw a graphical browser was eye-opening. I had only experienced telnet and gopher before that... I think this was probably '92-93 - like 3 years before Windows 95 even existed. This experience is what pushed me headlong into the nascent Linux, as the idea of going from NeXT to Windows 95 was like moving from a Ferrari to a tricycle. Linux was no Ferrari but it was at least a pickup truck....
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I remember the first time someone fired up Mosaic on a Sun workstation at work. At first the only pages were alma mater pages because no one had an IT department that knew how to set up a webserver yet. It didn't really dawn on me until people started putting up lyric pages for bands, and the speed at which you could access the data via links. I had been using FTP (and archie and gopher) up to that point, which involved a lot of typing and taking notes, and hyperlinks/bookmarks were light-years easier. That was the lightbulb for me.
codegeek 5y ago
"What happens in an Internet Minute in 2020, for example: - Zoom hosts 208,333 meetings - There are 404,444 Netflix user streams - YouTube users upload 500 hours of video - Consumers spend $1,000,000 online - 1,388,889 people make video/voice calls" Mind blowing if you think about it. I really want to focus on the positives of WWW in this thread. I, like million others, am making a living out of WWW and that itself is so amazing. Thank you Tim Berners-Lee and everyone else who made this happen. A remarkable Invention for the human kind.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I'd be curious to know how many combined page loads there are for PornHub (and cousins) per minute. It's just as much a part of what the web is today as any of the services listed above.
  - input_sh 5y ago
    Pornhub is very open about its metrics: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review
- lucasverra 5y ago
  I stopped being impressed by "one minute in the Internets" a couple of years ago. I mean, internet is at hands distance of many people now. As beer and toilet paper. Let's move to more significant metrics like people making a living out of it, value transferred or something else :)
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  No pedantic comment complaining, that the internet is older and not the same as the WWW? Well, then I am doing it ... So someone using youtube might be using the www, but is not when using the android app for example. Etc. blabla. And yes, the WWW is awesome, even though the spec is a wild chaos.
- akudha 5y ago
  These are all eye popping numbers. Somehow the YouTube number is scarier than others. With that much content, how is anyone supposed to find what they are interested in? No wonder YouTube’s algorithm is so bad. Even google can’t do a good job of search and recommendation at YouTube
beders 5y ago
And we still can't get complex forms right.
pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
Does anyone know if there is a URL for Tim Berners-Lee's book "Weaving the Web", where it is accessible over HTTP? Not even talking about gratis open access, just whether or not the Web-of-documents vision is actually in practice for TimBL's book itself. Also not talking about a link to a storefront that sells it, or a promo site, or a faithfully reproduced but non-canonical link to a warez'd copy. Specifically asking here whether the book has a URL. This seems like a pretty basic OKR for grading progress of the Web vision, and yet it seems reasonable to think the answer is "no", which is incredibly ironic (but not shocking). It was surprising just now to find that there is not even a preview on Google Books, nor are you allowed to search inside it.
- mattl 5y ago
  https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/ https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/ It’s not great
  - pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
    That's very obviously not a URL for the book. That's a URL for a promo site, i.e., one of the things explicitly listed as something not to reply with, since it's not an answer to the question being asked. "Specifically asking here whether the book has a URL." (Being a promo site, it is a place where we should expect the URL to be linked to, if it existed, but there is no such URL to be found on that page, hence the question...)
    - mattl 5y ago
      It’s the URL printed in the book.
      - pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
        Do you understand the relationship between questions and answers? You're answering a question no one asked. Why bother responding at all?
rvense 5y ago
I clearly remember when I first saw the www, a few years into its life, at a meeting in the Mac users group my dad was a part of, probably at a university department or similar that had internet access. I thought it was one of the dullest things I'd ever seen anyone do with a computer, and I didn't at all understand what was so interesting about this Netscape programme. I must have been about ten. I did grow to find it exciting for a few a years, my misspent youth on instant messenger and bulletin boards, learning, flamewars and a few friendships that last to this days... but as I approach 40 and the damn thing has both turned into my full-time job, and become corporate shadow of its old self, something out of a bad old depressing cyperpunk novel, I do sometimes think my initial reaction was closer to the right one.
- prpl 5y ago
  I remember one of the first things I wanted to actually see on the web was the Orbitz (drink) website (96/97?), although I remember seeing yahoo ~two years before in elementary school. I vaguely remember it actually being orbitz.com.
analog31 5y ago
Amusing anecdote: The computer that hosted the original WWW is in a little museum at CERN, open to the public. When my family saw it several years ago, it still had a hand written note taped to the side of it, something to the effect of "Please don't turn this computer off." It still amuses me to think that at one point, the entire WWW depended on someone remembering to not shut it down. Edit: See below. Reality is much more accurate than my memory. ;-)
- mattl 5y ago
  https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/104/298158460_5495a9443c.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/104/298158460_5495a9443c.jpg
- codegeek 5y ago
  It said "This machine is a server". Isn't that still true for any server ? I mean if you power off a server, it stops serving. I guess the what makes that note truly unique is that it was THE only server at that time ?
  - anyfoo 5y ago
    I guess it just means "even though this machine looks like a desktop computer (which it very much usually was as a NeXT station), it's actually acting as a server, so please don't shut it down like you would with a desktop machine". It by far wasn't the only "server" at that time. The WWW may be 30 years old, but the Internet is much older.
    - codegeek 5y ago
      correct. I mean the only server for WWW ?
      - analog31 5y ago
        Yes, I believe it was. One machine had to be the first www server.
- 5y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Mixed emotions. In many ways, it has been a true marvel, and so much good has come from it. In other ways, it has given us a proctoscope view of the human Id. https://c.tenor.com/97Iru0enngsAAAAM/yay.gif https://c.tenor.com/97Iru0enngsAAAAM/yay.gif
johnwheeler 5y ago
If you were around at the beginning of the boom and had an AOL, Juno, or Prodigy account; eventually gave NetZero a try; watched Hackers and even The Net, know what a .nfo file is, marveled at Napster; collected Winamp skins; signed up to have DVDs delivered to your mailbox; and when Internet, Information super-highway, World Wide Web, and cyberspace were used interchangeably, you’re one of the lucky ones. I love the Internet for all it is now, but man do I miss the wonder it instilled in its nascency.
NmAmDa 5y ago
Imagine that the early purpose was just to allow physicists working in big collaboration to work together from different places and handle data more easily. Who could guess that any of that will happen as a byproduct.
- kfprt 5y ago
  Who? Ted Kaczynski
14 5y ago
To me the internet means an access to information not seen by previous generations. I’ve learned a lot of backyard mechanics from my dad. But I have since gone on to achieve a lot more in that field by having access to YouTube or other forums where I can find detailed instructions on how to fix things. I think about hacking my Xbox 360 and jailbreaking my first iPhone when I realized the jailbroken phones could video record and stock iPhones could not. I met my first wife online. I was there in the beginning when pictures would slowly load from the top down because speeds were just that slow. The stuff you can do now over the internet is beyond imagination from a couple decades ago.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Yeah congrats to TBL and his baby. Actually, I believe the date is slightly off, and it should be August, 6th, according to the fist website [1], and in particular [2] linked from there. But I've got to ask what has W3C done lately? I mean JavaScript and CSS is not their fault, but looking at W3C's accomplishments, they were busy with XML and WS-* (SOAP), then RDF/Sparql, and whatnot most of the time, creating a cottage industry of "enterprise" standards but completely loosing relevance on the web. Meanwhile, HTML stagnated, and CSS had to become the way overcomplicated beast it is today to make up for HTML's shortcomings, HTML still mostly being the casual academic publishing markup language it always was. The result is the monopolistic browser landscape we have today and web authoring becoming unapproachable for all but an entrenched profession of "web developers" when the web was primarily a medium for easy self-publishing. Soon, Google implanted itself as the middle man, when getting rid of publishers and closed networks was the whole point of the web in the first place. Meanwhile, W3C continues to take money for driving CSS complexity ad absurdum (though they have talented people on the CSS WG for sure) and drops requirements for at least two interworking implementations for their XML stuff (such as XSLT). Basically, W3C is acting like a self-serving, pay-as-you org for advertising stuff as "standard". W3C's HTML 5 and SVG efforts have effectively stopped about three years ago. Today, almost nobody is inspired to make websites; even developers flock to github and other centralized services for their stuff. As much as I believe TBL acted in good faith, I think W3C as a standardization organization failed on all accounts that you could reasonably expect from a standardization effort. [1]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html [2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/History.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/History.html Edit: see also [3] for the proper date [3]: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6484.txt https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6484.txt
devchix 5y ago
I was looking for an old video of Tom Brokaw interviewing Gates and Schmidt, and found this. For a little laugh and innocent nostalgia: Flashback! The Internet In 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A I watched that clip and my inner monologue was all "Oh my sweet summer child, what do you know of 'The Internet'? "

226 points by telesilla 5y ago

> Our vision is for a World Wide Web that is more inclusive, and more respectful of its users: a Web that supports truth better than falsehood, people more than profits, humanity rather than hate. I support the principles, but I can't give the real implementation a passing grade.

tehjoker 5y ago
It's popular for liberals to say things like "truth better than falsehood" but they really mean that they want to be able to control what other people read. Only half of what they think is true at a given time actually is. The other half of the equation is that the more well monied get their message out better than the unmonied. You can't use technology to fix that. Most of the conspiracies we deplore are advanced by idiots with money.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > It's popular for liberals to say things like "truth better than falsehood" but they really mean that they want to be able to control what other people read. Can you conceive of a world, or even just one person, who could say "truth better than falsehood" and actually mean it? > The other half of the equation is that the more well monied get their message out better than the unmonied. There's a mixed record on this, really. Yes, massive but subtle spending can result in deep and wide dispersion of a "message". But then there's Rebecca Black and "Friday", too.

BrianOnHN 5y ago

Melancholy. So young but so old. Wandering without direction. Waking up. Will there be a spinoff? Something to bring meaning?

laurent92 5y ago
The previous Kondratiev cycles were: - Steam engine (1825) - Electrical engineering and chemistry (1913) - Automobile (1950) - Computers… and even that could be split between the database era (1980), the web era (2000), and the AI era (2030?). For each cycle, it starts like wild competition, and ends with installed actors. Who would think of being the small guy who topples Ford by reinventing automobile today? No-one. There is no going back: Automobile has no “meaning”, just usages. All of this just makes society go faster. The only meaning in life is participating to the economy, family, and raising people from poverty.
- tpmx 5y ago
  Computers: scientific computing era (1950), business computing era (1960), personal computing era (1980), web era (1995), mobile computing era (2005), social networking era (2010), ML/AI era (2020)

laurent92 5y ago

I’m more impressed that the first smartphone is only 14 years old and it has changed so much to our lives: - First, it developed the usage of superficial socialization (lifestyle show-off, body photos, up to lewd behaviors or prostitution, depression for a lot of people, massive societal dopamine addiction), - Second, Youtube was the world wild web of all politics and militant movements, - We’re in a third phase where most of it is under control, not tight but clearly guided, with many people doubting the accuracy of both sides. The phase of defiance. 3 phases (in my opinion) in just a few years, each of them responsible for negative societal shifts (from democratized prostitution to the invasion of Congress), and also positive ones (tech progress, political progress too, to be honest). Who knows what’s next?

scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
That comparison - the smartphone being 14 and the web being 30 really illustrates what a total warp jump it has all been. 15 years from boxy home computers connected to each other, to glowing high resolution pocket computer slabs. And then 15 years from those slabs being something totally new and revolutionary, to literally 50%* of all humans having them on their person at all times. The acceleration has definitely come with a lot of turbulence. If this acceleration is exponential, then what's next is a whole lot more turbulence. (Edit:*originally wrote 80% - I thought it would be higher at this point!)
- capableweb 5y ago
  > to literally 80% of all humans having them on their person at all times. While the number is high, it's not _that_ high (closer to 50%), at least from the sources I could find[1]. Where are you getting the 80% from? - [1] - https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w... - check the references in the bottom for digging deeper
  - scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
    Sorry, I didn't fact check or anything, point was just that they're commonplace, routine, cheap etc. Just a number I had in my head for some reason.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

vr46 5y ago

Personal observation: heck I’m old. General observation: this is the most brilliant invention of my lifetime, and has realized the information revolution, enabled countless humans to teach themselves and each other, and shown us a myriad of truths about ourselves. A++

echelon 5y ago

The WWW was pretty great at age 10, but took a wrong turn in its teen years. We now do signal amplification of the worst of humanity. The giants are walled gardens, and in another 10-15 years the "web" will be subsumed by Facebook, and Google's "Cromification/AMPlification" (content lives on their servers and there is no URL bar.) We've destroyed much of the quirkiness and novelty. Now instead of sharing content and news p2p, it flows from centralized behemoths that choose for us. RIP personal websites, RSS, IRC, and bittorrent. They still exist, just as shells of their former lives. Their promise sucked away. It's not like the rest of tech fared much better. You can't even run your own software on half of the devices out there now. Or replace their batteries. Or trust them not to spy on you.

goalieca 5y ago
The technology is just too tempting for totalitarians and tyrants of all degrees. It feels like humanity itself is in some sort of societal infancy.
pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
> The WWW was pretty great [...] We now do signal amplification of the worst of humanity Aren't non-Web ("anti-Web"?) platforms the greatest driver of this? You mention IRC and bittorrent. Nothing really Web about those, either. Are you thinking of WWW and The Internet as being interchangeable terms? Isn't this just a generic and vague luddite-doomer rant?
codegeek 5y ago
I would focus on the overall positives at least in this thread. Yes there are lot of valid criticisms but that is more on the companies and not WWW in itself. WWW is Free, Open and you can do anything you want with it even today. You mention personal websites. No one is stopping you from getting a cheap server and setting up your personal website. In fact, I would argue it is has become easier to do that with so many cheap and reliable options (.e.g DigitalOcean, Vultr etc). I run my personal website using WordPress (another great invention) and I am free to host it however I want.
- 5y ago

barosl 5y ago

It makes me feel strange to think that all these industries, all these jobs, and all these companies didn't exist just 30 years ago. Nowadays everyone says the web. It seems very hard to predict what technology will be dominant in another 30 years. It is fortunate that I will probably still live by then to witness the future. Anyway, congratulations to the web.

legrande 5y ago
> It seems very hard to predict what technology will be dominant in another 30 years The web seems to have bootstrapped entire industries who rely on its infra to operate. This will be the same story in the next 20 years. The web is the foundation, the innovation you will see, will piggyback on top of it, unless something else serves as the underlying basis (cough blockchain).

struct 5y ago

It's great that the web is so durable and long-lived, but I wonder about the health of it - it's got so complicated that we're down to only three implementations (Firefox, Chromium, WebKit), no realistic possibility of a new engine emerging, and essentially one implementation defining the standard. I wonder where we'll be in another 30 years?

tpmx 5y ago
This is the greatest crime against the web, IMO. The growing complexity for the past decade has been driven almost entirely by Google. I'm now pretty convinced they did it as a part of an explicit strategy. It's so insidious - on the one hand they are improving the web, on the other hand, the complexity they are driving makes the web more vulnerable.
- samatman 5y ago
  > they did it as a part of an explicit strategy Yep. First they embraced the browser by building some nice shiny, er, Chrome on top of WebKit. Then, they proceeded to extend it, and extend it, and extend it. While paying Mozilla to stay in business, to avoid antitrust attention. Now they've very nearly extinguished the other engines. What can I say, they learned from the best.
JiNCMG 5y ago
It's always like this until the next new thing. The big guys will control everything until something new comes around that they don't want to implement. It will be a bit harder because you have the Web Browser which is a lot flexible than the old AOL Clients. Also WebKit is available publicly for any one to fork and create a new service. When modems were available for residential use, BBSes were the gateway and slowly were killed by the big guys (AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy) but what these big guys refused to do is work together to allow further communications with people outside of their networks. It took kids coming out of college and wanting to keep their internet access for email, ftp, talk, usenet, gopher and http. They started to partner with universities and offer TCP/IP (over PPP) access for $20. Local BBS started to open gateways to allow it's users to send/receive SMTP emails. By the time the big guys realized they were at a disadvantage, they started to offer communications between AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy, At first charging their users extra fees, some plans made it like SMS and were charging per message. Eventually users where just using their clients to get to the internet and that service dies. Most of those small internet providers were purchased by bigger companies. What will need to change now to kick the big guys (Verizon, Google, Apple, etc...) in the balls again? The tech is so regulated that I doubt we will see anything new as far and networking. In NYC WiMax was hobbled by the communication companies like Verizon TimeWarner and RCN.

flenserboy 5y ago

A guy I went to college with was there for the birth of the web. I remember him coming back that Fall, and him showing me, on one of our campus NeXTs, this new "World Wide Web" thing. "Cool, I guess. It's like Hypercard," I said, "but not as capable — but it is networked...so how is this better than Gopher? What's the use case?" "Just wait," he replied, "you can't build on Gopher like you can on this." Times changed quickly.

_red 5y ago
>our campus NeXTs, this new "World Wide Web" thing Similar story. My lab had 2 NeXT cubes (the monochrome version) and the first time I saw a graphical browser was eye-opening. I had only experienced telnet and gopher before that... I think this was probably '92-93 - like 3 years before Windows 95 even existed. This experience is what pushed me headlong into the nascent Linux, as the idea of going from NeXT to Windows 95 was like moving from a Ferrari to a tricycle. Linux was no Ferrari but it was at least a pickup truck....

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I remember the first time someone fired up Mosaic on a Sun workstation at work. At first the only pages were alma mater pages because no one had an IT department that knew how to set up a webserver yet. It didn't really dawn on me until people started putting up lyric pages for bands, and the speed at which you could access the data via links. I had been using FTP (and archie and gopher) up to that point, which involved a lot of typing and taking notes, and hyperlinks/bookmarks were light-years easier. That was the lightbulb for me.

codegeek 5y ago

"What happens in an Internet Minute in 2020, for example: - Zoom hosts 208,333 meetings - There are 404,444 Netflix user streams - YouTube users upload 500 hours of video - Consumers spend $1,000,000 online - 1,388,889 people make video/voice calls" Mind blowing if you think about it. I really want to focus on the positives of WWW in this thread. I, like million others, am making a living out of WWW and that itself is so amazing. Thank you Tim Berners-Lee and everyone else who made this happen. A remarkable Invention for the human kind.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I'd be curious to know how many combined page loads there are for PornHub (and cousins) per minute. It's just as much a part of what the web is today as any of the services listed above.
- input_sh 5y ago
  Pornhub is very open about its metrics: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review
lucasverra 5y ago
I stopped being impressed by "one minute in the Internets" a couple of years ago. I mean, internet is at hands distance of many people now. As beer and toilet paper. Let's move to more significant metrics like people making a living out of it, value transferred or something else :)
hutzlibu 5y ago
No pedantic comment complaining, that the internet is older and not the same as the WWW? Well, then I am doing it ... So someone using youtube might be using the www, but is not when using the android app for example. Etc. blabla. And yes, the WWW is awesome, even though the spec is a wild chaos.
akudha 5y ago
These are all eye popping numbers. Somehow the YouTube number is scarier than others. With that much content, how is anyone supposed to find what they are interested in? No wonder YouTube’s algorithm is so bad. Even google can’t do a good job of search and recommendation at YouTube

beders 5y ago

And we still can't get complex forms right.

pwdisswordfish0 5y ago

Does anyone know if there is a URL for Tim Berners-Lee's book "Weaving the Web", where it is accessible over HTTP? Not even talking about gratis open access, just whether or not the Web-of-documents vision is actually in practice for TimBL's book itself. Also not talking about a link to a storefront that sells it, or a promo site, or a faithfully reproduced but non-canonical link to a warez'd copy. Specifically asking here whether the book has a URL. This seems like a pretty basic OKR for grading progress of the Web vision, and yet it seems reasonable to think the answer is "no", which is incredibly ironic (but not shocking). It was surprising just now to find that there is not even a preview on Google Books, nor are you allowed to search inside it.

mattl 5y ago
https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/ https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/ It’s not great
- pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
  That's very obviously not a URL for the book. That's a URL for a promo site, i.e., one of the things explicitly listed as something not to reply with, since it's not an answer to the question being asked. "Specifically asking here whether the book has a URL." (Being a promo site, it is a place where we should expect the URL to be linked to, if it existed, but there is no such URL to be found on that page, hence the question...)
  - mattl 5y ago
    It’s the URL printed in the book.
    - pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
      Do you understand the relationship between questions and answers? You're answering a question no one asked. Why bother responding at all?

rvense 5y ago

I clearly remember when I first saw the www, a few years into its life, at a meeting in the Mac users group my dad was a part of, probably at a university department or similar that had internet access. I thought it was one of the dullest things I'd ever seen anyone do with a computer, and I didn't at all understand what was so interesting about this Netscape programme. I must have been about ten. I did grow to find it exciting for a few a years, my misspent youth on instant messenger and bulletin boards, learning, flamewars and a few friendships that last to this days... but as I approach 40 and the damn thing has both turned into my full-time job, and become corporate shadow of its old self, something out of a bad old depressing cyperpunk novel, I do sometimes think my initial reaction was closer to the right one.

prpl 5y ago
I remember one of the first things I wanted to actually see on the web was the Orbitz (drink) website (96/97?), although I remember seeing yahoo ~two years before in elementary school. I vaguely remember it actually being orbitz.com.

analog31 5y ago

Amusing anecdote: The computer that hosted the original WWW is in a little museum at CERN, open to the public. When my family saw it several years ago, it still had a hand written note taped to the side of it, something to the effect of "Please don't turn this computer off." It still amuses me to think that at one point, the entire WWW depended on someone remembering to not shut it down. Edit: See below. Reality is much more accurate than my memory. ;-)

mattl 5y ago
https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/104/298158460_5495a9443c.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/104/298158460_5495a9443c.jpg
codegeek 5y ago
It said "This machine is a server". Isn't that still true for any server ? I mean if you power off a server, it stops serving. I guess the what makes that note truly unique is that it was THE only server at that time ?
- anyfoo 5y ago
  I guess it just means "even though this machine looks like a desktop computer (which it very much usually was as a NeXT station), it's actually acting as a server, so please don't shut it down like you would with a desktop machine". It by far wasn't the only "server" at that time. The WWW may be 30 years old, but the Internet is much older.
  - codegeek 5y ago
    correct. I mean the only server for WWW ?
    - analog31 5y ago
      Yes, I believe it was. One machine had to be the first www server.
5y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Mixed emotions. In many ways, it has been a true marvel, and so much good has come from it. In other ways, it has given us a proctoscope view of the human Id. https://c.tenor.com/97Iru0enngsAAAAM/yay.gif https://c.tenor.com/97Iru0enngsAAAAM/yay.gif

johnwheeler 5y ago

If you were around at the beginning of the boom and had an AOL, Juno, or Prodigy account; eventually gave NetZero a try; watched Hackers and even The Net, know what a .nfo file is, marveled at Napster; collected Winamp skins; signed up to have DVDs delivered to your mailbox; and when Internet, Information super-highway, World Wide Web, and cyberspace were used interchangeably, you’re one of the lucky ones. I love the Internet for all it is now, but man do I miss the wonder it instilled in its nascency.

NmAmDa 5y ago

Imagine that the early purpose was just to allow physicists working in big collaboration to work together from different places and handle data more easily. Who could guess that any of that will happen as a byproduct.

kfprt 5y ago
Who? Ted Kaczynski

14 5y ago

To me the internet means an access to information not seen by previous generations. I’ve learned a lot of backyard mechanics from my dad. But I have since gone on to achieve a lot more in that field by having access to YouTube or other forums where I can find detailed instructions on how to fix things. I think about hacking my Xbox 360 and jailbreaking my first iPhone when I realized the jailbroken phones could video record and stock iPhones could not. I met my first wife online. I was there in the beginning when pictures would slowly load from the top down because speeds were just that slow. The stuff you can do now over the internet is beyond imagination from a couple decades ago.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

Yeah congrats to TBL and his baby. Actually, I believe the date is slightly off, and it should be August, 6th, according to the fist website [1], and in particular [2] linked from there. But I've got to ask what has W3C done lately? I mean JavaScript and CSS is not their fault, but looking at W3C's accomplishments, they were busy with XML and WS-* (SOAP), then RDF/Sparql, and whatnot most of the time, creating a cottage industry of "enterprise" standards but completely loosing relevance on the web. Meanwhile, HTML stagnated, and CSS had to become the way overcomplicated beast it is today to make up for HTML's shortcomings, HTML still mostly being the casual academic publishing markup language it always was. The result is the monopolistic browser landscape we have today and web authoring becoming unapproachable for all but an entrenched profession of "web developers" when the web was primarily a medium for easy self-publishing. Soon, Google implanted itself as the middle man, when getting rid of publishers and closed networks was the whole point of the web in the first place. Meanwhile, W3C continues to take money for driving CSS complexity ad absurdum (though they have talented people on the CSS WG for sure) and drops requirements for at least two interworking implementations for their XML stuff (such as XSLT). Basically, W3C is acting like a self-serving, pay-as-you org for advertising stuff as "standard". W3C's HTML 5 and SVG efforts have effectively stopped about three years ago. Today, almost nobody is inspired to make websites; even developers flock to github and other centralized services for their stuff. As much as I believe TBL acted in good faith, I think W3C as a standardization organization failed on all accounts that you could reasonably expect from a standardization effort. [1]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html [2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/History.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/History.html Edit: see also [3] for the proper date [3]: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6484.txt https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6484.txt

devchix 5y ago

I was looking for an old video of Tom Brokaw interviewing Gates and Schmidt, and found this. For a little laugh and innocent nostalgia: Flashback! The Internet In 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A I watched that clip and my inner monologue was all "Oh my sweet summer child, what do you know of 'The Internet'? "