6 ms·

Tim Berners-Lee's Original Announcement (1991)

184 points by peterb 14y ago

stroboskop 14y ago
This turned out to be a historic announcement. Note that the release was in source and binary form. The liberal copyright policy wisely chosen by Tim Berners-Lee was an important reason for the WWW's success. In contrast, this post again reminds me that the Usenet-archives are now owned by Google. Are they also available anywhere else? Like the WWW they are part of the world's cultural heritage. It's good that the archives are accessible, but they shouldn't be proprietary.
- yock 14y ago
  Some entity must commit funds to storing and keeping those archives available. I understand your concern, but no one company or government is more or less likely to do something folish with those archives than any other.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Google owns the most extensive archives of usenet because it has put in the effort. There's no reason that anyone else couldn't have done the same, they just failed to do so. Google acquired dejanews, an old usenet archival site, and they sought out personal archives as well to expand the collection. We should be happy that they have done anything, the more likely outcome was for no comprehensive archive ever to have been made.
  - zbowling 14y ago
    No, it's because they bought the company, Deja, that was responsible for putting the first widespread web interface on Usenet. Google groups used to be just Usenet until it forked into something different (user lists). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News
    - InclinedPlane 14y ago
      Did you read my post all the way through? I know they acquired dejanews, I said it. But they also went to the effort to make use of deja's archive and to keep it safe. More so, they sought out private usenet archives and integrated them into their collection. Indeed, the very message that sparked this discussion comes from the work that google did and not from the dejanews archive since it dates to 1991, 4 years before deja began operations.
      - zbowling 14y ago
        Yah I thought I did. I didn't see Deja the first time I read it. May be my mistake because I'm tired from hacking all night (5am here), but it seemed shorter (the whole middle sentence wasn't there) the first time I read your comment.
      - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
        I disagree with this comment: > We should be happy that they have done anything, the more likely outcome was for no comprehensive archive ever to have been made. I think that's not the case, I think the existence of Google Groups is regarded as "good enough" by groups that might otherwise be doing archiving (Internet Archive, for one). That Groups started out with good intentions isn't surprising, but it has evolved into something completely different. If the intent was to archive an important part of the history of the internet, viewing posts wouldn't be behind a login-wall.
        timothya 14y ago
        It isn't behind a login wall. If you saw a login screen when trying to access the link, then you must be partially logged into Google in the first place. Try the link in an incognito window and you'll see that no login is required.
- jetti 14y ago
  "The liberal copyright policy wisely chosen by Tim Berners-Lee was an important reason for the WWW's success." While Berners-Lee may have had a say in the matter, I think the credit goes to CERN for that one as they are the copyright holder: "The code is not strictly public domain: it is copyright CERN (see copyright notice is in the .tar), but is free to collaborating institutes." Still, there is no doubting that the liberal licensing helped WWW's success.
jgeralnik 14y ago
However, it could start a revolution in information access I'll say...
zbowling 14y ago
> However, it could start a revolution in information access. They had no idea.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Actually, that the thought entered his mind at all is quite prescient.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  Start a revolution in information access, and speed the process of real world revolution. Happy Birthday WWW indeed.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Perhaps one day we'll look back at the 20th century as the century of the Ws: WWI, WWII, WWW.
- tribeofone 14y ago
  I've read this memo dozens of times, and I never get tired of reading that line.
- jballanc 14y ago
  Reminds me of "the most famous understatement in history" from the original Watson & Crick paper: > It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
  - Create 14y ago
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/photo51/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/photo51/ They were literally jerks. Franklin's work hasn't escaped them either. He isn't even denying the misappropriation, after all, that is what a physicist does by his definition (take other people's data ...work): http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1380325 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1380325 just for the record and to please the prospective downvoting mob, here are my experimental observations consistent with the cern experimental domain in order to warn any non-westerners: "The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X] source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264 Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines. What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was quite graphical programming, and not world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around -- certainly not western equivalents. Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. world-wide. Nobody was astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic. They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given away without charge. WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of. CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Veltman if you feel to downvote this because of CERN.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
21 years to go from science lab side-project to the foundation of many of the largest multi-billion dollar companies in history and the glue to a worldwide communication network right out of science fiction. What will the next 21 years bring?
- pasbesoin 14y ago
  On the cautionary side, look at where many of those science labs are going -- in the U.S., for example. Increasingly dependent upon corporate funding and so, more or less, under the corporate thumb. I'm not saying it's inevitable, but it's a warning sign for the Net, as well.
brackishlake 14y ago
Amazing. It's impressive how forward-thinking his final thoughts on. So often in history we can't see how important something is at the very beginning of the story.
nixarn 14y ago
But it was on August 6? Right?
flashmob 14y ago
Actually, the earliest mention is here: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6487%40cernvax.cern.ch http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6487%40cernvax.cern.ch Other famous usenet posts: http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html
- fl3tch 14y ago
  You know what's interesting? The immediate follow up to that first message, by Richard Chimera, mentions Randy Pausch. Does anybody remember him? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo Small world.
aj700 14y ago
I take nothing away from what he did and I'm one of those people who dislike it when some people belittle what he did. He did the browser and the protocol and the url scheme. The excellence of NeXTSTEP helped. I only recently learned that a lot of the design of html, in terms of deciding how to fit sgml to markup the "Web" was also Dave Raggett. So people who say TBL "copied" SGML are wrong in two ways. There was also Calliau. Then all the other html "tags" that came afterwards, with NSCA Mosaic and Netscape and then W3C additions. Andreessen famously suggesting img etc. But TBL joined html with what else it needed to take over.
chimeracoder 14y ago
I haven't seen anyone link to it yet, so here is that first server (magnet link): https://gist.github.com/3404362 https://gist.github.com/3404362 There was a Reddit effort to recover it some months back, as it was believed to be lost. (It's now on the w3.org page, but IIRC, either it wasn't then, or it's a slightly later version published there). http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/q4e57/help_save_the_worlds_first_webserver_we_need_to/ http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/q4e57/help_save_the...
- deno 14y ago
  Link to a link? :) magnet:?xt=urn:btih:30cf16d23446f98217c67b3b8840fbdb21ba1c9e
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    Haha, thanks for the catch - I just copied that directly from a tweet. I couldn't tweet a magnet link (too long, and not supported by bit.ly) - hence the gist. Anyway, please feel free to download this piece of history!
nsxwolf 14y ago
The Web is now old enough to drink! Let's buy the Web a drink.
eclipxe 14y ago
Today's version: Show HN: My weekend project, WorldWideWeb (5 days from funding, Kickstarter details in comments!)
m0wfo 14y ago
Personally I don't think it'll catch on.
Zarathust 14y ago
I just read that and thought "meh...". I wonder how many such invention I pass everyday
- 27182818284 14y ago
  In all fairness it was meh at its release. It didn't even support images.
ta12121 14y ago
OK, but why? I mean, who here hasn't seen this or know about it?
- smokestack 14y ago
  Yesterday was its 11th anniversary if for no other reason.

184 points by peterb 14y ago

This turned out to be a historic announcement. Note that the release was in source and binary form. The liberal copyright policy wisely chosen by Tim Berners-Lee was an important reason for the WWW's success. In contrast, this post again reminds me that the Usenet-archives are now owned by Google. Are they also available anywhere else? Like the WWW they are part of the world's cultural heritage. It's good that the archives are accessible, but they shouldn't be proprietary.

yock 14y ago
Some entity must commit funds to storing and keeping those archives available. I understand your concern, but no one company or government is more or less likely to do something folish with those archives than any other.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Google owns the most extensive archives of usenet because it has put in the effort. There's no reason that anyone else couldn't have done the same, they just failed to do so. Google acquired dejanews, an old usenet archival site, and they sought out personal archives as well to expand the collection. We should be happy that they have done anything, the more likely outcome was for no comprehensive archive ever to have been made.
- zbowling 14y ago
  No, it's because they bought the company, Deja, that was responsible for putting the first widespread web interface on Usenet. Google groups used to be just Usenet until it forked into something different (user lists). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Did you read my post all the way through? I know they acquired dejanews, I said it. But they also went to the effort to make use of deja's archive and to keep it safe. More so, they sought out private usenet archives and integrated them into their collection. Indeed, the very message that sparked this discussion comes from the work that google did and not from the dejanews archive since it dates to 1991, 4 years before deja began operations.
    - zbowling 14y ago
      Yah I thought I did. I didn't see Deja the first time I read it. May be my mistake because I'm tired from hacking all night (5am here), but it seemed shorter (the whole middle sentence wasn't there) the first time I read your comment.
    - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
      I disagree with this comment: > We should be happy that they have done anything, the more likely outcome was for no comprehensive archive ever to have been made. I think that's not the case, I think the existence of Google Groups is regarded as "good enough" by groups that might otherwise be doing archiving (Internet Archive, for one). That Groups started out with good intentions isn't surprising, but it has evolved into something completely different. If the intent was to archive an important part of the history of the internet, viewing posts wouldn't be behind a login-wall.
      - timothya 14y ago
        It isn't behind a login wall. If you saw a login screen when trying to access the link, then you must be partially logged into Google in the first place. Try the link in an incognito window and you'll see that no login is required.
jetti 14y ago
"The liberal copyright policy wisely chosen by Tim Berners-Lee was an important reason for the WWW's success." While Berners-Lee may have had a say in the matter, I think the credit goes to CERN for that one as they are the copyright holder: "The code is not strictly public domain: it is copyright CERN (see copyright notice is in the .tar), but is free to collaborating institutes." Still, there is no doubting that the liberal licensing helped WWW's success.

jgeralnik 14y ago

However, it could start a revolution in information access I'll say...

zbowling 14y ago

> However, it could start a revolution in information access. They had no idea.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago
Actually, that the thought entered his mind at all is quite prescient.
nicholassmith 14y ago
Start a revolution in information access, and speed the process of real world revolution. Happy Birthday WWW indeed.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Perhaps one day we'll look back at the 20th century as the century of the Ws: WWI, WWII, WWW.
tribeofone 14y ago
I've read this memo dozens of times, and I never get tired of reading that line.
jballanc 14y ago
Reminds me of "the most famous understatement in history" from the original Watson & Crick paper: > It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
- Create 14y ago
  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/photo51/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/photo51/ They were literally jerks. Franklin's work hasn't escaped them either. He isn't even denying the misappropriation, after all, that is what a physicist does by his definition (take other people's data ...work): http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1380325 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1380325 just for the record and to please the prospective downvoting mob, here are my experimental observations consistent with the cern experimental domain in order to warn any non-westerners: "The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X] source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264 Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines. What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was quite graphical programming, and not world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around -- certainly not western equivalents. Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. world-wide. Nobody was astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic. They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given away without charge. WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of. CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Veltman if you feel to downvote this because of CERN.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

21 years to go from science lab side-project to the foundation of many of the largest multi-billion dollar companies in history and the glue to a worldwide communication network right out of science fiction. What will the next 21 years bring?

pasbesoin 14y ago
On the cautionary side, look at where many of those science labs are going -- in the U.S., for example. Increasingly dependent upon corporate funding and so, more or less, under the corporate thumb. I'm not saying it's inevitable, but it's a warning sign for the Net, as well.

brackishlake 14y ago

Amazing. It's impressive how forward-thinking his final thoughts on. So often in history we can't see how important something is at the very beginning of the story.

nixarn 14y ago

But it was on August 6? Right?

flashmob 14y ago

Actually, the earliest mention is here: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6487%40cernvax.cern.ch http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6487%40cernvax.cern.ch Other famous usenet posts: http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html

fl3tch 14y ago
You know what's interesting? The immediate follow up to that first message, by Richard Chimera, mentions Randy Pausch. Does anybody remember him? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo Small world.

aj700 14y ago

I take nothing away from what he did and I'm one of those people who dislike it when some people belittle what he did. He did the browser and the protocol and the url scheme. The excellence of NeXTSTEP helped. I only recently learned that a lot of the design of html, in terms of deciding how to fit sgml to markup the "Web" was also Dave Raggett. So people who say TBL "copied" SGML are wrong in two ways. There was also Calliau. Then all the other html "tags" that came afterwards, with NSCA Mosaic and Netscape and then W3C additions. Andreessen famously suggesting img etc. But TBL joined html with what else it needed to take over.

chimeracoder 14y ago

I haven't seen anyone link to it yet, so here is that first server (magnet link): https://gist.github.com/3404362 https://gist.github.com/3404362 There was a Reddit effort to recover it some months back, as it was believed to be lost. (It's now on the w3.org page, but IIRC, either it wasn't then, or it's a slightly later version published there). http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/q4e57/help_save_the_worlds_first_webserver_we_need_to/ http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/q4e57/help_save_the...

deno 14y ago
Link to a link? :) magnet:?xt=urn:btih:30cf16d23446f98217c67b3b8840fbdb21ba1c9e
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  Haha, thanks for the catch - I just copied that directly from a tweet. I couldn't tweet a magnet link (too long, and not supported by bit.ly) - hence the gist. Anyway, please feel free to download this piece of history!

nsxwolf 14y ago

The Web is now old enough to drink! Let's buy the Web a drink.

eclipxe 14y ago

Today's version: Show HN: My weekend project, WorldWideWeb (5 days from funding, Kickstarter details in comments!)

m0wfo 14y ago

Personally I don't think it'll catch on.

Zarathust 14y ago

I just read that and thought "meh...". I wonder how many such invention I pass everyday

27182818284 14y ago
In all fairness it was meh at its release. It didn't even support images.

ta12121 14y ago

OK, but why? I mean, who here hasn't seen this or know about it?

smokestack 14y ago
Yesterday was its 11th anniversary if for no other reason.