7 ms·

The million dollar question, of course, is whether Tim Berners-Lee—or someone else—would have built a web browser anyway, or at least something very similar. We

The million dollar question, of course, is whether Tim Berners-Lee—or someone else—would have built a web browser anyway, or at least something very similar. We don't know the counterfactual.

chrisco255 4y ago
Well, yes, there was already an existing web concept out of University of Minnesota called Gopher: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) But it had many limitations WWW/HTTP did not, and was crippled by restrictive licensing. Still, probably reasonably likely Gopher would have been riffed on by a different open source hacker eventually, had WWW not been created.
- adventured 4y ago
  As is typical, many of the pieces were primed to lead to the Web outcome, and Berners-Lee was the right person in the right place at the right time. It certainly could have been someone else. Just as another company would have done some variation (better or worse) of what Apple did with the iPhone (most of the pieces were ready to do it well and Jobs saw that). The more intriguing question is how things might have occurred differently, if the beginnings were derived from a different set of factors & actors. It could have been a lot more obnoxiously commercial from the beginning (AOL & CompuServe style).
  - tudorw 4y ago
    Xanadu
    - mixmastamyk 4y ago
      A place… where nobody dared to go…
      - tannhaeuser 4y ago
        A million lights are dancing and there you are
    - themadturk 4y ago
      now we are here...
    - jdougan 4y ago
      I wonder how that would have worked if the Autodesk situation had been more gentle. eg. they had xu88/Green/Classic working well enough for actual usage while they built out xu92/Gold.
      - tudorw 4y ago
        not sure, but I think with AI's help to codify and code, we could build it now :)
        jdougan 4y ago
        I've been looking deeply at the existing Xanadu docs so I have a pretty good sense of how it all was supposed to work. Could I get a look at the stuff you did with the LLM? I want to see what it gets wrong as there is a lot of misleading data out there on Xanadu and Enfilades. (contact info in bio)
        tudorw 3y ago
        https://github.com/tudorw/Xanadonot https://github.com/tudorw/Xanadonot it's all on a public repo, it's basically an unfiltered chat between me and gpt, someone more familiar tried some of the python code and said it ran so...would love to hear your feedback :)
  - macintux 4y ago
    My belief has been that sure, someone would have created a device like the iPhone, but remembering just how consumer-hostile the phone manufacturers and carriers were at the time, it would have: * required a carrier-specific App Store * been just one of 20 models sold by the manufacturer * gathered dust in their awful retail stores because the salespeople had no idea how to use it or incentive to sell it Not only did Apple create the device, but they threw their entire weight behind it (and of course had a built-in fan base eager to try it), and committed to its success. Even Google with Android was experimenting with multiple form factors, and would not have demonstrated that level of commitment to a single one.
    - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
      I think you just described Symbian.
    - adventured 4y ago
      I also think it was invaluable that the iPhone app system was heavily secured (app approvals/reviews/restrictions) and or closed in the early years. Consumers were coming from a terrible Windows stretch where viruses plagued the mass PC systems connected to the Internet. They mostly didn't have to worry about that while learning how to best utilize the iPhone in their day to day lives. Apple made several excellent pro-consumer choices that many other companies would not have (including squeezing the telecom companies; which at the time, Apple & Co were nowhere near the size they are now, pushing around big telecom was no small feat).
    - tjoff 4y ago
      That is a very US specific problem though. It would have been easy to make a store for java apps present on other platforms as well. Could even have been a java app itself or a homepage.
    - rkagerer 4y ago
      Don't forget it was preceeded by the iPod, which had a momentum of popularity Apple could build on. As well, the original iPhone was a very different device - in my opinion the platform didn't realize its potential until they opened it up to third party apps and the App Store. I still think Palm squandered their decade headstart and I actually like their UI so much better. What could have been if only they hadn't made such terrible business decisions...
  - detourdog 4y ago
    I'm actually trying to pickup up the pre-personal computer design ideas and design an analog type computer as if the pc never happened. I believe it is these types of questions that drives the cycle of development.
- detourdog 4y ago
  Gopher was better than www until the graphical web browser existed. The gui browser had one technical requirement that gopher did not. The gui browser required a node address on the network or ip address. One could access the www from gopher. The gateway page for the www stated Welcome to the World Wide Web. There is no top or bottom which is what distinguished it from gopher. That had a top of the tree and bottom of the tree of links.
marban 4y ago
Apple should have just doubled down on HyperCard
- scarface74 4y ago
  And ended up with something like Flash?
- Maursault 4y ago
  Functionally speaking, the WWW is an implementation of HyperCard. They're very similar, again, functionally.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
Interesting data point... By 1988 Theo Gray also in Urbana-Champaign, had build the notebook interface for Mathematica's release that summer, which is nowadays cloned as originally iPython Notebooks then generalized as Jupyter for various languages. This is still popular in the Mathematica version as well, and can do many things HTML browsers demonstrated years later.
- anthk 4y ago
  Maxima existed far before iPython.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    Did Maxima have a notebook interface back before Mathematica's appeared in 1988, and many years later iPython cloned it (with credit given to Theo Gray's idea) ?
    - anthk 4y ago
      Maxima it's the continuation of Macsyma. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma
      - detourdog 4y ago
        I used your prompt to look into Macsyma which led me to maxima. What a great tool I just finished the 10 minute tutorial. https://mathblog.com/a-10-minute-tutorial-for-solving-math-problems-with-maxima/ https://mathblog.com/a-10-minute-tutorial-for-solving-math-p...
      - jjtheblunt 4y ago
        I know that, but did it have the notebook interface like people call Jupyter nowadays, which was based on IPython which was an explicitly described honoring of Mathematica for Python? I ask because I don't know if Macsyma had that...we had a university site license for Mathematica so in my case I never had Macsyma to play with back then.
exsf0859 4y ago
There were tons of alternative hypertext systems before the world wide web. Major reasons WWW succeeded: 1) Open standard, no license required. (My understanding is that TB-L worked hard to make this happen.) 2) A forgiving text-based format that was trivial to author, serve, and display. And evolve with forward/backwards compatibility. 3) One-way links. (Many other HyperText projects were hung up on bi-directional links.) 4) URLs didn't require any centralized authority other than already-existing DNS.
- rjsw 4y ago
  It probably hit just the right time in terms of available CPU power and network speed for a text-based format to get accepted.
  - valley_guy_12 4y ago
    The web could have plausibly existed as early as FTP did. Which would have been 1972. Plenty of documents from that era had URL-like manual links of the form "pub/foo/bar.txt at MIT-AI", and many FTP servers supported anonymous login and were fast enough for real-time text document retrieval. It is kind of embarrassing that it took 20 years to invent URLs and browsers.
    - rjsw 4y ago
      I wrote a networked hypertext system in 1985 but it used a binary "page" format to save bandwidth. The GUI used was GEM. Another road not taken could have been to define a rich text format in ASN.1 and build a browser on top of the OSI network stack.
      - ngcc_hk 4y ago
        Phd needed to understand Asn.1 and … osi network stack. Good luck.
        rjsw 4y ago
ff317 4y ago
Not to knock the amazing contributions of Tim, but IMHO Gopher and HyperCard had already laid a lot of the important concepts down in various suboptimal ways. I think there were enough smart people using both in the 90s that it was virtually inevitable that something like Tim's work was bound to arise somewhere, somehow, as a merger of and improvement on those two sets of ideas.
- amelius 4y ago
  Don't forget about Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel > The service was rolled out experimentally on 15 July 1980 in Saint-Malo, France (...) > From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to what is now made possible by the World Wide Web.
  - throwaway60607 4y ago
    It was similar from the user point of view, but it was absolutely different from creator/admin point of view. It was supposed to be a service provided by big cable/telecom companies and not something that everyone would've been able to use to create. The whole architecture gives it away - minitel is merely a display device to a telecom mainframe, paid per minute of connection. The average Joe was not supposed to create their own services/pages.
    - amelius 4y ago
      Perhaps their plan was to, once successful, create a Minitel AppStore and allow smaller developers ...
      - throwaway60607 4y ago
        Given how big telecoms usually behave, I really don't think so. Remember the fight for usable mobile internet... Ever tried WAP and developing on it? They set the whole thing up to control it and charge extraorbitant fees for it both to the user and to anyone publishing on it. Minitel as well as WAP. Apple's 30% is peanuts compared to the fees I'm talking about - I mean contracts with minimums in millions. Good thing Apple kicked their sand castle down. People don't give them enough credit for that.
ohjfjfk 4y ago
[dead]
amelius 4y ago
> The million dollar question Don't forget about the 150 million dollar investment made by Microsoft that saved Apple.
- signatoremo 4y ago
  This has been discussed many times here and elsewhere, but it was not an investment, but rather $150 million purchase of Apple stock. The symbolic of it, as well as the confidence of Microsoft to continue developing Office for Mac software for at least 5 years, helped save Apple, and not any cash infusion. https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-microsoft-saved-apple/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-mic...
  - detourdog 4y ago
    It also settled a long standing lawsuit and a lot of cross licensing.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Who knows, we might have something better than a networked document format masquerading as an application delivery platform. Something in spirit to 3270 or X/RDP and programmable with a single language.
eviks 4y ago
That's a $1 question with "yes" as the answer, it wasn't that unique/hard to think it couldn't have been done elsewhere (but true that we don't know alternative histories)

The million dollar question, of course, is whether Tim Berners-Lee—or someone else—would have built a web browser anyway, or at least something very similar. We don't know the counterfactual.

chrisco255 4y ago

Well, yes, there was already an existing web concept out of University of Minnesota called Gopher: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) But it had many limitations WWW/HTTP did not, and was crippled by restrictive licensing. Still, probably reasonably likely Gopher would have been riffed on by a different open source hacker eventually, had WWW not been created.

adventured 4y ago
As is typical, many of the pieces were primed to lead to the Web outcome, and Berners-Lee was the right person in the right place at the right time. It certainly could have been someone else. Just as another company would have done some variation (better or worse) of what Apple did with the iPhone (most of the pieces were ready to do it well and Jobs saw that). The more intriguing question is how things might have occurred differently, if the beginnings were derived from a different set of factors & actors. It could have been a lot more obnoxiously commercial from the beginning (AOL & CompuServe style).
- tudorw 4y ago
  Xanadu
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    A place… where nobody dared to go…
    - tannhaeuser 4y ago
      A million lights are dancing and there you are
  - themadturk 4y ago
    now we are here...
  - jdougan 4y ago
    I wonder how that would have worked if the Autodesk situation had been more gentle. eg. they had xu88/Green/Classic working well enough for actual usage while they built out xu92/Gold.
    - tudorw 4y ago
      not sure, but I think with AI's help to codify and code, we could build it now :)
      - jdougan 4y ago
        I've been looking deeply at the existing Xanadu docs so I have a pretty good sense of how it all was supposed to work. Could I get a look at the stuff you did with the LLM? I want to see what it gets wrong as there is a lot of misleading data out there on Xanadu and Enfilades. (contact info in bio)
        tudorw 3y ago
        https://github.com/tudorw/Xanadonot https://github.com/tudorw/Xanadonot it's all on a public repo, it's basically an unfiltered chat between me and gpt, someone more familiar tried some of the python code and said it ran so...would love to hear your feedback :)
- macintux 4y ago
  My belief has been that sure, someone would have created a device like the iPhone, but remembering just how consumer-hostile the phone manufacturers and carriers were at the time, it would have: * required a carrier-specific App Store * been just one of 20 models sold by the manufacturer * gathered dust in their awful retail stores because the salespeople had no idea how to use it or incentive to sell it Not only did Apple create the device, but they threw their entire weight behind it (and of course had a built-in fan base eager to try it), and committed to its success. Even Google with Android was experimenting with multiple form factors, and would not have demonstrated that level of commitment to a single one.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    I think you just described Symbian.
  - adventured 4y ago
    I also think it was invaluable that the iPhone app system was heavily secured (app approvals/reviews/restrictions) and or closed in the early years. Consumers were coming from a terrible Windows stretch where viruses plagued the mass PC systems connected to the Internet. They mostly didn't have to worry about that while learning how to best utilize the iPhone in their day to day lives. Apple made several excellent pro-consumer choices that many other companies would not have (including squeezing the telecom companies; which at the time, Apple & Co were nowhere near the size they are now, pushing around big telecom was no small feat).
  - tjoff 4y ago
    That is a very US specific problem though. It would have been easy to make a store for java apps present on other platforms as well. Could even have been a java app itself or a homepage.
  - rkagerer 4y ago
    Don't forget it was preceeded by the iPod, which had a momentum of popularity Apple could build on. As well, the original iPhone was a very different device - in my opinion the platform didn't realize its potential until they opened it up to third party apps and the App Store. I still think Palm squandered their decade headstart and I actually like their UI so much better. What could have been if only they hadn't made such terrible business decisions...
- detourdog 4y ago
  I'm actually trying to pickup up the pre-personal computer design ideas and design an analog type computer as if the pc never happened. I believe it is these types of questions that drives the cycle of development.
detourdog 4y ago
Gopher was better than www until the graphical web browser existed. The gui browser had one technical requirement that gopher did not. The gui browser required a node address on the network or ip address. One could access the www from gopher. The gateway page for the www stated Welcome to the World Wide Web. There is no top or bottom which is what distinguished it from gopher. That had a top of the tree and bottom of the tree of links.

marban 4y ago

Apple should have just doubled down on HyperCard

scarface74 4y ago
And ended up with something like Flash?
Maursault 4y ago
Functionally speaking, the WWW is an implementation of HyperCard. They're very similar, again, functionally.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

Interesting data point... By 1988 Theo Gray also in Urbana-Champaign, had build the notebook interface for Mathematica's release that summer, which is nowadays cloned as originally iPython Notebooks then generalized as Jupyter for various languages. This is still popular in the Mathematica version as well, and can do many things HTML browsers demonstrated years later.

anthk 4y ago
Maxima existed far before iPython.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Did Maxima have a notebook interface back before Mathematica's appeared in 1988, and many years later iPython cloned it (with credit given to Theo Gray's idea) ?
  - anthk 4y ago
    Maxima it's the continuation of Macsyma. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma
    - detourdog 4y ago
      I used your prompt to look into Macsyma which led me to maxima. What a great tool I just finished the 10 minute tutorial. https://mathblog.com/a-10-minute-tutorial-for-solving-math-problems-with-maxima/ https://mathblog.com/a-10-minute-tutorial-for-solving-math-p...
    - jjtheblunt 4y ago
      I know that, but did it have the notebook interface like people call Jupyter nowadays, which was based on IPython which was an explicitly described honoring of Mathematica for Python? I ask because I don't know if Macsyma had that...we had a university site license for Mathematica so in my case I never had Macsyma to play with back then.

exsf0859 4y ago

There were tons of alternative hypertext systems before the world wide web. Major reasons WWW succeeded: 1) Open standard, no license required. (My understanding is that TB-L worked hard to make this happen.) 2) A forgiving text-based format that was trivial to author, serve, and display. And evolve with forward/backwards compatibility. 3) One-way links. (Many other HyperText projects were hung up on bi-directional links.) 4) URLs didn't require any centralized authority other than already-existing DNS.

rjsw 4y ago
It probably hit just the right time in terms of available CPU power and network speed for a text-based format to get accepted.
- valley_guy_12 4y ago
  The web could have plausibly existed as early as FTP did. Which would have been 1972. Plenty of documents from that era had URL-like manual links of the form "pub/foo/bar.txt at MIT-AI", and many FTP servers supported anonymous login and were fast enough for real-time text document retrieval. It is kind of embarrassing that it took 20 years to invent URLs and browsers.
  - rjsw 4y ago
    I wrote a networked hypertext system in 1985 but it used a binary "page" format to save bandwidth. The GUI used was GEM. Another road not taken could have been to define a rich text format in ASN.1 and build a browser on top of the OSI network stack.
    - ngcc_hk 4y ago
      Phd needed to understand Asn.1 and … osi network stack. Good luck.
      - rjsw 4y ago

ff317 4y ago

Not to knock the amazing contributions of Tim, but IMHO Gopher and HyperCard had already laid a lot of the important concepts down in various suboptimal ways. I think there were enough smart people using both in the 90s that it was virtually inevitable that something like Tim's work was bound to arise somewhere, somehow, as a merger of and improvement on those two sets of ideas.

amelius 4y ago
Don't forget about Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel > The service was rolled out experimentally on 15 July 1980 in Saint-Malo, France (...) > From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to what is now made possible by the World Wide Web.
- throwaway60607 4y ago
  It was similar from the user point of view, but it was absolutely different from creator/admin point of view. It was supposed to be a service provided by big cable/telecom companies and not something that everyone would've been able to use to create. The whole architecture gives it away - minitel is merely a display device to a telecom mainframe, paid per minute of connection. The average Joe was not supposed to create their own services/pages.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Perhaps their plan was to, once successful, create a Minitel AppStore and allow smaller developers ...
    - throwaway60607 4y ago
      Given how big telecoms usually behave, I really don't think so. Remember the fight for usable mobile internet... Ever tried WAP and developing on it? They set the whole thing up to control it and charge extraorbitant fees for it both to the user and to anyone publishing on it. Minitel as well as WAP. Apple's 30% is peanuts compared to the fees I'm talking about - I mean contracts with minimums in millions. Good thing Apple kicked their sand castle down. People don't give them enough credit for that.

ohjfjfk 4y ago

[dead]

amelius 4y ago

> The million dollar question Don't forget about the 150 million dollar investment made by Microsoft that saved Apple.

signatoremo 4y ago
This has been discussed many times here and elsewhere, but it was not an investment, but rather $150 million purchase of Apple stock. The symbolic of it, as well as the confidence of Microsoft to continue developing Office for Mac software for at least 5 years, helped save Apple, and not any cash infusion. https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-microsoft-saved-apple/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-mic...
- detourdog 4y ago
  It also settled a long standing lawsuit and a lot of cross licensing.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Who knows, we might have something better than a networked document format masquerading as an application delivery platform. Something in spirit to 3270 or X/RDP and programmable with a single language.

eviks 4y ago

That's a $1 question with "yes" as the answer, it wasn't that unique/hard to think it couldn't have been done elsewhere (but true that we don't know alternative histories)