I would really like to try writing something along the lines of “the web from scratch” one day. I wouldn’t want it to be just a retelling of the history of the

I would really like to try writing something along the lines of “the web from scratch” one day. I wouldn’t want it to be just a retelling of the history of the internet, but rather building up a set of abstractions from some physical example of communication to your own mental model of a hypertext standard on top of a simple transport protocol, sort of like Charles Petzold’s Code. The web is complex nowadays, but it also actively hides its implementation from you to be a better product. Dialing a phone number with a modem on both ends has a sort of real tactility to it that’s pretty alien to young people that expect it to be “harder”. You can pick up the phone on the line and hear that something is going on. The computers are “talking” on the phone. A metered Internet connection means I was constantly aware of how much data is going over that phone call. What takes huge chunks of that budget and what barely touches it. My ISP even gave our family some web space to use. Like just the peek behind the curtain you get from putting a file on an FTP server, then requesting it in telnet and seeing every letter I typed zip in from the other side really illuminates a lot. If I ask the computer I called for a file in a special way, it sort of shouts it back at me over the phone call, and my computer can listen and understand that. It’s not like it was the best implementation of the “product” that is the Internet. Anyone saying the contrary really is an old person shouting at a cloud. But I do have some sense of being lucky to get to explore the web in that era!