5 ms·

The Web's Timeline

78 points by marban 4y ago

kosasbest 4y ago
> May 18 2021: Digital Millennium Copyright Act Wasn't the DMCA enacted a lot earlier? Wikipedia says the following[1]: > The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
- gmmeyer 4y ago
  yea the webpage is wildly incorrect, wikipedia is right
- ChrisArchitect 4y ago
  That's just the date when the article on it was posted to the blog. C'mon.
fourstar 4y ago
Props for listing k10k (which CryptoPunks was heavily inspired from). No mention of E/N (Everything/Nothing) sites, though (markside, john's crawlspace, histandard, badassmofo, chilidog.org, etc, etc)
- marban 4y ago
  For the kids: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/kaliber10000-2003 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/kaliber10000-2003
- enobrev 4y ago
  I owe a good deal of my career to the fine folks at Cuban Council. Loved working with all of them.
sbf501 4y ago
Raise your hand if you're one of the ding-dongs who in 1991 thought the internet was only ever going to be good for song lyrics and porn. /raises hand in shame/ (Note: i'm excluding things like EaasySabre [sic])
- night-rider 4y ago
  Well if you want to get academic about it: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-of-evolutionary-perspectives-on-human-behavior/internet-is-for-porn/8D0F6BB1728865C071D76F545FFFBAE9 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-...
- zwieback 4y ago
  I was a dedicated archie and gopher user, thought web was going to be just for grandmas. EaasySabre was awesome, though, I switched from Delphi to CompuServe around then. Also really liked PointCast, that was a lifesaver when our whole company shared a dial-up modem connection.
upupandup 4y ago
curious as to why nothing after 2018? are we approaching the end of novelty as established domains act as cartels? It seems that so much new progress is being made in AI/ML. I wonder what the next "internet" will be. I only started out with Netscape Navigator in 1998. I remember reading HTML for dummies and thinking its so easy to do by hand. Then I discovered geocities and I can drag & drop? Then I stopped paying attention for like a few years until I discovered PHP. I really miss the aesthetics of late 90s websites
- hbn 4y ago
  > I really miss the aesthetics of late 90s websites You should check this out: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me Here's the first page I got on a roll of the "surprise me" button just now: http://texaschainsawmassacre.net/Music/ http://texaschainsawmassacre.net/Music/
  - upupandup 4y ago
    omg!!! i loved it, got a big dose of nostalgia
- Swizec 4y ago
  Maybe 4 years just isn’t long enough for history to form? Hard to recognize pivotal moments as they are happening.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  WebAssembly should definitively be on the list.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  > I wonder what the next "internet" will be This is the third Network, so if it helps you to draw a line: The first Network was what is now called the Universal Postal Union created by the Treaty of Bern. It moves written text in the form of letters, on pieces of paper, in envelopes. The Treaty says OK, how about if everybody can just put their own local stamps on letters, and write any address in the world, we all agree to move the letters to the address and we can pay for that work with the local stamps we sold, it's simpler and on average it works out fine. Before this, to send a letter from say, Nottingham to Leipzig, you must wrap each letter in another letter explaining to an intermediary how to get it to its destination, or to the next intermediary (e.g. Portsmouth, Le Havre, Strasbourg), each with suitable stamps for the local postal system. This is both time-consuming, expensive and fragile. The second Network was the Public Switched Telephone Network. This was formed by connecting local telephone networks around the globe together, and using switches (eventually digital switches) so that circuits could be created by the end user rather than needing a human operator who worked for the phone company to make the circuit connecting your call. With the PSTN you could (for a fee) talk to people on distant parts of the planet almost instantly. The third Network improves on the second by being designed for moving arbitrary data (bits) rather than voices and more importantly by being packet oriented rather than circuit switched. If you see something claiming to be the "next Internet" and it isn't at least as radical an improvement as IP was over the PSTN, then it's lying to you. My guess is if a fourth Network happens, it would move physical material of some sort, like the first Network did, but digitally - which is currently impossible but is perhaps a technology that could some day be invented. Such a technology would be able to obsolete some of the things we can't use this Network for today.
zwieback 4y ago
I still consider Word Magazine an early high point of online culture, nothing quite replaced it for me.
bag_boy 4y ago
Had no clue IMDb was that old
tannhaeuser 4y ago
> [HTML] itself was influenced by similar efforts like SGML, but has since evolved into a lot more. Time for some pedantry: HTML is/was envisioned as SGML vocabulary, ie. using SGML as markup meta-language to describe the elements, content models, attributes, predefined entities, and other parsing rules for HTML such as tag inferences and attribute shortforms. Or at least TBL tried to. Also, the basic rich text vocabulary of HTML for paragraphs, spans, headers, etc. is already used in ISO 8879 (SGML) as a commonly used "folklore" markup convention, with only the anchor element (<a>) and a couple others being genuinely new. And finally, "similar efforts" at the time would be HyTime (also an SGML application) not SGML itself.
hyakosm 4y ago
Where is the Apache (httpd) server?
dang 4y ago
Related: The Web from 1989 to 1994 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27928020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27928020 - July 2021 (22 comments)
peakminute 4y ago
gpspake 4y ago
I love this sort of thing. Whenever I try to make a case for anything at work, I always try to frame it in a historical context because everything we do in computing exists on a historical timeline that's relatively short and ongoing and we shouldn't necessarily hold anything as a universal truth. It's possible that everything we hold dear (OOP, etc) will be a blip in early computing history in the grand scheme of things. I work in web so one thing I preach a lot is that a lot of the explosion of activity in JS over the past decade or so can largely be traced back to the introduction of the iphone, the subsequent mass adoption of mobile devices, and the sudden expectation for native-app like experiences from the web on low powered devices. Thus, a lot of notions about javascript that persist from pre mobile, pre es6, etc need to be checked. "Javascript framework of the week" cynicisms tend to persist from a brief period of "throwing stuff at the wall" to figure out how to leverage AJAX to achieve SPA. Now the language and its ecosystem has matured tremendously and there are other problems to solve so it's important to constantly renew our perceptions and biases. Here's a js timeline I threw together recently https://time.graphics/editor/649085 https://time.graphics/editor/649085
Lammy 4y ago
> To pitch it, he submits a proposal for organizing scientific documents to his employers titled “Information Management, a Proposal.” If this is going to be the opening item then it would be nice to at least have a blurb about predecessor ideas. Tim Berners-Lee's "Information Management: A Proposal" cites Ted Nelson for the concepts behind "Hypertext" and the "docuverse". Nelson was directly inspired by Vannevar Bush and the idea of the Memex as presented in "As We May Think". Bush had his own influences, of course, like the Statistical Machine, but it's a huge miss to not go back at least this far considering the US Government's role in building the actual ARPANET/Internet. Bush was director of OSRD / S-1 Executive Committee at the time of "As We May Think", so there's a direct link of influence between the eventual World Wide Web concept and that of the network itself. https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html https://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html https://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Executive_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Executive_Committee
- cgh 4y ago
  Somewhat tangentially, for those who are curious, Vannevar Bush was influential beyond his invention of the memex. As head of OSRD, he helped initiate the Manhattan Project and the National Science Foundation. Previously at MIT, he mentored one of his grad students, a guy you might have heard of named Claude Shannon. It's hard to think of a modern equivalent to someone so pivotal.
jaredcwhite 4y ago
1994 was a wild time. I'm pretty sure that's when I first connected to the internet and got my first e-mail address (at cello.gina.calstate.edu!). Using Mosaic and soon Netscape Navigator for the first time was nothing short of mind-blowing. By 1996, I was publishing my own websites, and then in 1997 someone paid me to build them a website. 25 years later, I'm still getting paid to build websites. What a ride!
shaunxcode 4y ago
wish this had some more prehistory e.g. BBS, gopher etc.

78 points by marban 4y ago

> May 18 2021: Digital Millennium Copyright Act Wasn't the DMCA enacted a lot earlier? Wikipedia says the following[1]: > The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

gmmeyer 4y ago
yea the webpage is wildly incorrect, wikipedia is right
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
That's just the date when the article on it was posted to the blog. C'mon.

fourstar 4y ago

Props for listing k10k (which CryptoPunks was heavily inspired from). No mention of E/N (Everything/Nothing) sites, though (markside, john's crawlspace, histandard, badassmofo, chilidog.org, etc, etc)

marban 4y ago
For the kids: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/kaliber10000-2003 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/kaliber10000-2003
enobrev 4y ago
I owe a good deal of my career to the fine folks at Cuban Council. Loved working with all of them.

sbf501 4y ago

Raise your hand if you're one of the ding-dongs who in 1991 thought the internet was only ever going to be good for song lyrics and porn. /raises hand in shame/ (Note: i'm excluding things like EaasySabre [sic])

night-rider 4y ago
Well if you want to get academic about it: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-of-evolutionary-perspectives-on-human-behavior/internet-is-for-porn/8D0F6BB1728865C071D76F545FFFBAE9 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-...
zwieback 4y ago
I was a dedicated archie and gopher user, thought web was going to be just for grandmas. EaasySabre was awesome, though, I switched from Delphi to CompuServe around then. Also really liked PointCast, that was a lifesaver when our whole company shared a dial-up modem connection.

upupandup 4y ago

curious as to why nothing after 2018? are we approaching the end of novelty as established domains act as cartels? It seems that so much new progress is being made in AI/ML. I wonder what the next "internet" will be. I only started out with Netscape Navigator in 1998. I remember reading HTML for dummies and thinking its so easy to do by hand. Then I discovered geocities and I can drag & drop? Then I stopped paying attention for like a few years until I discovered PHP. I really miss the aesthetics of late 90s websites

hbn 4y ago
> I really miss the aesthetics of late 90s websites You should check this out: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me Here's the first page I got on a roll of the "surprise me" button just now: http://texaschainsawmassacre.net/Music/ http://texaschainsawmassacre.net/Music/
- upupandup 4y ago
  omg!!! i loved it, got a big dose of nostalgia
Swizec 4y ago
Maybe 4 years just isn’t long enough for history to form? Hard to recognize pivotal moments as they are happening.
tiborsaas 4y ago
WebAssembly should definitively be on the list.
tialaramex 4y ago
> I wonder what the next "internet" will be This is the third Network, so if it helps you to draw a line: The first Network was what is now called the Universal Postal Union created by the Treaty of Bern. It moves written text in the form of letters, on pieces of paper, in envelopes. The Treaty says OK, how about if everybody can just put their own local stamps on letters, and write any address in the world, we all agree to move the letters to the address and we can pay for that work with the local stamps we sold, it's simpler and on average it works out fine. Before this, to send a letter from say, Nottingham to Leipzig, you must wrap each letter in another letter explaining to an intermediary how to get it to its destination, or to the next intermediary (e.g. Portsmouth, Le Havre, Strasbourg), each with suitable stamps for the local postal system. This is both time-consuming, expensive and fragile. The second Network was the Public Switched Telephone Network. This was formed by connecting local telephone networks around the globe together, and using switches (eventually digital switches) so that circuits could be created by the end user rather than needing a human operator who worked for the phone company to make the circuit connecting your call. With the PSTN you could (for a fee) talk to people on distant parts of the planet almost instantly. The third Network improves on the second by being designed for moving arbitrary data (bits) rather than voices and more importantly by being packet oriented rather than circuit switched. If you see something claiming to be the "next Internet" and it isn't at least as radical an improvement as IP was over the PSTN, then it's lying to you. My guess is if a fourth Network happens, it would move physical material of some sort, like the first Network did, but digitally - which is currently impossible but is perhaps a technology that could some day be invented. Such a technology would be able to obsolete some of the things we can't use this Network for today.

zwieback 4y ago

I still consider Word Magazine an early high point of online culture, nothing quite replaced it for me.

bag_boy 4y ago

Had no clue IMDb was that old

tannhaeuser 4y ago

> [HTML] itself was influenced by similar efforts like SGML, but has since evolved into a lot more. Time for some pedantry: HTML is/was envisioned as SGML vocabulary, ie. using SGML as markup meta-language to describe the elements, content models, attributes, predefined entities, and other parsing rules for HTML such as tag inferences and attribute shortforms. Or at least TBL tried to. Also, the basic rich text vocabulary of HTML for paragraphs, spans, headers, etc. is already used in ISO 8879 (SGML) as a commonly used "folklore" markup convention, with only the anchor element (<a>) and a couple others being genuinely new. And finally, "similar efforts" at the time would be HyTime (also an SGML application) not SGML itself.

hyakosm 4y ago

Where is the Apache (httpd) server?

dang 4y ago

Related: The Web from 1989 to 1994 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27928020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27928020 - July 2021 (22 comments)

peakminute 4y ago

gpspake 4y ago

I love this sort of thing. Whenever I try to make a case for anything at work, I always try to frame it in a historical context because everything we do in computing exists on a historical timeline that's relatively short and ongoing and we shouldn't necessarily hold anything as a universal truth. It's possible that everything we hold dear (OOP, etc) will be a blip in early computing history in the grand scheme of things. I work in web so one thing I preach a lot is that a lot of the explosion of activity in JS over the past decade or so can largely be traced back to the introduction of the iphone, the subsequent mass adoption of mobile devices, and the sudden expectation for native-app like experiences from the web on low powered devices. Thus, a lot of notions about javascript that persist from pre mobile, pre es6, etc need to be checked. "Javascript framework of the week" cynicisms tend to persist from a brief period of "throwing stuff at the wall" to figure out how to leverage AJAX to achieve SPA. Now the language and its ecosystem has matured tremendously and there are other problems to solve so it's important to constantly renew our perceptions and biases. Here's a js timeline I threw together recently https://time.graphics/editor/649085 https://time.graphics/editor/649085

Lammy 4y ago

> To pitch it, he submits a proposal for organizing scientific documents to his employers titled “Information Management, a Proposal.” If this is going to be the opening item then it would be nice to at least have a blurb about predecessor ideas. Tim Berners-Lee's "Information Management: A Proposal" cites Ted Nelson for the concepts behind "Hypertext" and the "docuverse". Nelson was directly inspired by Vannevar Bush and the idea of the Memex as presented in "As We May Think". Bush had his own influences, of course, like the Statistical Machine, but it's a huge miss to not go back at least this far considering the US Government's role in building the actual ARPANET/Internet. Bush was director of OSRD / S-1 Executive Committee at the time of "As We May Think", so there's a direct link of influence between the eventual World Wide Web concept and that of the network itself. https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html https://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html https://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Executive_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Executive_Committee

cgh 4y ago
Somewhat tangentially, for those who are curious, Vannevar Bush was influential beyond his invention of the memex. As head of OSRD, he helped initiate the Manhattan Project and the National Science Foundation. Previously at MIT, he mentored one of his grad students, a guy you might have heard of named Claude Shannon. It's hard to think of a modern equivalent to someone so pivotal.

jaredcwhite 4y ago

1994 was a wild time. I'm pretty sure that's when I first connected to the internet and got my first e-mail address (at cello.gina.calstate.edu!). Using Mosaic and soon Netscape Navigator for the first time was nothing short of mind-blowing. By 1996, I was publishing my own websites, and then in 1997 someone paid me to build them a website. 25 years later, I'm still getting paid to build websites. What a ride!

shaunxcode 4y ago

wish this had some more prehistory e.g. BBS, gopher etc.