5 ms·

The World Wide Web (1994)

56 points by bubblehed 3y ago

nilsbunger 3y ago
"Mosaic is truly a high-quality application. But the price for beauty is more memory and disk space. Mosaic consumes over 1.3MB of disk space, and will use about 2MB of RAM while running." I don't know about those fancy graphical browsers, who has those kinds of resources to just throw at some pretty pictures?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I also disagree that Mosaic was a "truly high-quality application". I remember it being a buggy, finicky mess. But it did something unique and brand new, so I put up with it.
  - doctor_eval 3y ago
    It was pretty amazing at the time. Most tech people I knew just used GUIs to tile lots of terminal windows. I built Mosaic from source, and I remember scrolling through an article on Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in front of my boss. When the image of the comet hitting Jupiter scrolled into view, he nearly fell off his chair.
- ape4 3y ago
  Oh no, I only have 640K
  - ant6n 3y ago
    That ought to be enough for anybody.
blakesterz 3y ago
"The burden of the Web on a Linux server was tested by creating a working Web site on a i386-33 Linux machine. During a 40 day span, the PSU Linux WWW received 5375 requests from 1328 different sites around the world. This is an average of 6.9 requests per hour and 165 per day. The Web requests never interfered with any work being done by other users at the machine. A Linux system can easily provide Web services and have horsepower to spare." I love reading all the mid-late 90s articles on the web. I guess I'm old enough to say I'm "re-reading" all of this now. I can still remember the first time I saw an animated gif! That damn thing was like magic. This article was bullish, I really love the old ones that say things like "this is a fad"!
- anthk 3y ago
  https://linuxgazette.net/archives.html https://linuxgazette.net/archives.html Enjoy.
  - Nux 3y ago
    Gosh, most of those pages are so fast to load and so readable.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  I was actually surprised that Linux was mature enough that it had a "journal" dedicated to it when the web was new - my memory is hazy, but if I'd had to guess, I would have guessed that the web actually predated linux. I was definitely already pretty familiar with the world-wide web before I had heard of Linux.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    It does predate Linux but it's more complicated. Think about Linux Journal at the time as more "Linux newsletter". "The Web" was initially on OpenStep and commercial Unixes like HP-UX, Irix and SunOS. It was becoming dominant at that time amidst its siblings like gopher, uucp, archie, netnews, etc but still was pretty new. Here's a hype video from DEC about the web in early 1994 for example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-1l6aBgX5UY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-1l6aBgX5UY That browser is NCSA mosaic btw and I presume that's running Tru64. 1994 was still very much the era of educating people, even professionals, about the WWW
- sodapopcan 3y ago
  In case those who aren't as old as us are confused, "animated gif" is not a redundant term. There was a time when static gifs were just as common as animated ones, if not more so! :upsidedown-face: (definitely for sure more-so if you include spacer.gif)
  - interfixus 3y ago
    More so. Mid-nineties web static images were either jpg og gif. Preferably gifs, which mostly compressed way better for anything but photos. With proper indexing, color limitation, dithering, bitcount, and vigilant observance of proper websafe color palette you could shave amazing extra kilobytes off precious bandwith. Animations were for Geocities.
figital 3y ago
WinGopher "Complete" ... $129.00 ... https://librarytechnology.org/document/7548 https://librarytechnology.org/document/7548
- musicale 3y ago
  Shame that UMN may have sabotaged gopher with licensing fees. On the other hand many web browsers supported gopher for another decade at least.
jasoneckert 3y ago
It's always nice to see early definitions of the Web, because those definitions are something we've largely lost today on a societal level (or confused with the Internet or the cloud). The Internet is a worldwide computer network and the World Wide Web refers to the worldwide collection of web servers (wherever they may be) hosting HTML-accessible content. And the cloud is just a new term for the World Wide Web that expands the definition to include the worldwide collection of any Internet-accessible service, including web apps.
- musicale 3y ago
  > cloud is just a new term for the World Wide Web I think of cloud computing as network-accessible computing resources, often provided by commercial services like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.. (Though private clouds are also a possibility.) These services typically provide web-based management interfaces and HTTPS-based control APIs, but the computing resources themselves are not tied to the web or HTTP(S). For example I usually interact with cloud computing resources using SSH - a modern equivalent to the remote terminal/remote login protocols that predated the web by decades. Perhaps you are thinking of CDNs like Cloudflare or Akamai which cache web content for faster access, scalability, and resistance to DDoS?
irrational 3y ago
I wish they had come up with a different name than WWW or World Wide Web. Those are too long to say. Internet is inaccurate. Web and Net haven’t really caught on, in my experience. I’m not sure what a better name would be, but ideally three syllables or less that people would actually use consistently. Too late now.
- majikandy 3y ago
  Online
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- mostlysimilar 3y ago
  I hear "web" often enough when specifically referring to WWW. Nowadays most people interact with each other via apps, so I think "internet" is accurate enough.
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  I've always loved that World Wide Web is faster to say than WWW. I never say it, but it's interesting!
  - LMMojo 3y ago
    Yes, 3 syllables versus 9 syllables. Funny, isn't it?
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    We entertained "dub-three" in those days, but it didn't catch on. The nickname, I mean. I worked as a consultant connecting businesses to the Internet, and boss asked me if I thought this WWW thing was here to stay, or a fad. I replied, "meh, it's a fad" because I had been underwhelmed by its implementation, compared to some mind-blowing infrastructure systems, GUIs and wonders like the MBONE (talk about fads). I believe that the tipping point for WWW is when it was realized as a platform for delivering applications (SaaS). Once that angle became apparent, all resources were expended on making that a reality.
doctor_eval 3y ago
The article says that there were “millions” of users, and at the time I felt like I was a late adopter despite being a Gopher user, then WWW, starting with Lynx and then Mosaic. It’s weird to look back and realise that I was among the first 0.1% of people alive today, to start using the web.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  When I first got on in the UK in the early 90s I think I could probably name almost every commercial user of the Internet.

56 points by bubblehed 3y ago

"Mosaic is truly a high-quality application. But the price for beauty is more memory and disk space. Mosaic consumes over 1.3MB of disk space, and will use about 2MB of RAM while running." I don't know about those fancy graphical browsers, who has those kinds of resources to just throw at some pretty pictures?

JohnFen 3y ago
I also disagree that Mosaic was a "truly high-quality application". I remember it being a buggy, finicky mess. But it did something unique and brand new, so I put up with it.
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  It was pretty amazing at the time. Most tech people I knew just used GUIs to tile lots of terminal windows. I built Mosaic from source, and I remember scrolling through an article on Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in front of my boss. When the image of the comet hitting Jupiter scrolled into view, he nearly fell off his chair.
ape4 3y ago
Oh no, I only have 640K
- ant6n 3y ago
  That ought to be enough for anybody.

blakesterz 3y ago

"The burden of the Web on a Linux server was tested by creating a working Web site on a i386-33 Linux machine. During a 40 day span, the PSU Linux WWW received 5375 requests from 1328 different sites around the world. This is an average of 6.9 requests per hour and 165 per day. The Web requests never interfered with any work being done by other users at the machine. A Linux system can easily provide Web services and have horsepower to spare." I love reading all the mid-late 90s articles on the web. I guess I'm old enough to say I'm "re-reading" all of this now. I can still remember the first time I saw an animated gif! That damn thing was like magic. This article was bullish, I really love the old ones that say things like "this is a fad"!

anthk 3y ago
https://linuxgazette.net/archives.html https://linuxgazette.net/archives.html Enjoy.
- Nux 3y ago
  Gosh, most of those pages are so fast to load and so readable.
commandlinefan 3y ago
I was actually surprised that Linux was mature enough that it had a "journal" dedicated to it when the web was new - my memory is hazy, but if I'd had to guess, I would have guessed that the web actually predated linux. I was definitely already pretty familiar with the world-wide web before I had heard of Linux.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  It does predate Linux but it's more complicated. Think about Linux Journal at the time as more "Linux newsletter". "The Web" was initially on OpenStep and commercial Unixes like HP-UX, Irix and SunOS. It was becoming dominant at that time amidst its siblings like gopher, uucp, archie, netnews, etc but still was pretty new. Here's a hype video from DEC about the web in early 1994 for example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-1l6aBgX5UY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-1l6aBgX5UY That browser is NCSA mosaic btw and I presume that's running Tru64. 1994 was still very much the era of educating people, even professionals, about the WWW
sodapopcan 3y ago
In case those who aren't as old as us are confused, "animated gif" is not a redundant term. There was a time when static gifs were just as common as animated ones, if not more so! :upsidedown-face: (definitely for sure more-so if you include spacer.gif)
- interfixus 3y ago
  More so. Mid-nineties web static images were either jpg og gif. Preferably gifs, which mostly compressed way better for anything but photos. With proper indexing, color limitation, dithering, bitcount, and vigilant observance of proper websafe color palette you could shave amazing extra kilobytes off precious bandwith. Animations were for Geocities.

figital 3y ago

WinGopher "Complete" ... $129.00 ... https://librarytechnology.org/document/7548 https://librarytechnology.org/document/7548

musicale 3y ago
Shame that UMN may have sabotaged gopher with licensing fees. On the other hand many web browsers supported gopher for another decade at least.

jasoneckert 3y ago

It's always nice to see early definitions of the Web, because those definitions are something we've largely lost today on a societal level (or confused with the Internet or the cloud). The Internet is a worldwide computer network and the World Wide Web refers to the worldwide collection of web servers (wherever they may be) hosting HTML-accessible content. And the cloud is just a new term for the World Wide Web that expands the definition to include the worldwide collection of any Internet-accessible service, including web apps.

musicale 3y ago
> cloud is just a new term for the World Wide Web I think of cloud computing as network-accessible computing resources, often provided by commercial services like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.. (Though private clouds are also a possibility.) These services typically provide web-based management interfaces and HTTPS-based control APIs, but the computing resources themselves are not tied to the web or HTTP(S). For example I usually interact with cloud computing resources using SSH - a modern equivalent to the remote terminal/remote login protocols that predated the web by decades. Perhaps you are thinking of CDNs like Cloudflare or Akamai which cache web content for faster access, scalability, and resistance to DDoS?

irrational 3y ago

I wish they had come up with a different name than WWW or World Wide Web. Those are too long to say. Internet is inaccurate. Web and Net haven’t really caught on, in my experience. I’m not sure what a better name would be, but ideally three syllables or less that people would actually use consistently. Too late now.

majikandy 3y ago
Online
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mostlysimilar 3y ago
I hear "web" often enough when specifically referring to WWW. Nowadays most people interact with each other via apps, so I think "internet" is accurate enough.
RandallBrown 3y ago
I've always loved that World Wide Web is faster to say than WWW. I never say it, but it's interesting!
- LMMojo 3y ago
  Yes, 3 syllables versus 9 syllables. Funny, isn't it?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  We entertained "dub-three" in those days, but it didn't catch on. The nickname, I mean. I worked as a consultant connecting businesses to the Internet, and boss asked me if I thought this WWW thing was here to stay, or a fad. I replied, "meh, it's a fad" because I had been underwhelmed by its implementation, compared to some mind-blowing infrastructure systems, GUIs and wonders like the MBONE (talk about fads). I believe that the tipping point for WWW is when it was realized as a platform for delivering applications (SaaS). Once that angle became apparent, all resources were expended on making that a reality.

doctor_eval 3y ago

The article says that there were “millions” of users, and at the time I felt like I was a late adopter despite being a Gopher user, then WWW, starting with Lynx and then Mosaic. It’s weird to look back and realise that I was among the first 0.1% of people alive today, to start using the web.

qingcharles 3y ago
When I first got on in the UK in the early 90s I think I could probably name almost every commercial user of the Internet.