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The experience was very different on a NeXT computer. WAIS was modeled after the built in DigitalLibrarian software. You would select a site in the upper pane

The experience was very different on a NeXT computer. WAIS was modeled after the built in DigitalLibrarian software. You would select a site in the upper pane, and enter a search term in the box in the middle, and a list of documents would come back in the bottom pane that you could double click and open. Very search engine like. Gopher was structured and I think Gemini today still sticks with the format. You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane. WWW didn't seem like much in comparison because they were freeform documents without app level navigation support and there wasn't support for images or much formatting and people had not learned to make web pages so it was really hard to see the future of what it would grow to become. I'm not known for picking winners :-(

hinkley 7mo ago
My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row. I had a friend who was the most junior developer on the Mosaic team and one day he took me to his office to show me a text document with an image in the middle of it. In theory I met Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina that day but I just wanted to go do something with my friend. I did not get it. At all. A year later my girlfriend had to re-explain it to me and then another few months later I applied to work there in a support role. I don't think she knew what to do with the level of enthusiasm I wasn't bringing to this opportunity. A year after that I'm sitting in a bar after a tech convention in Chicago, wearing my Mosaic t-shirt, and someone said, 'where did you get that shirt?' When I told them we were on the team, you'd have thought I'd said we were Madonna's backup band. I never entirely understood that "I'd rather be lucky than good" sentiment until my luck ran out, and now I know.
- FpUser 7mo ago
  >"My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row." Ha, I missed so many great things. The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started. Luckily (or not) I am an easy going person and do not dwell on things.
  - hinkley 7mo ago
    I could have retired making early iPhone apps but I was already so burned out on how shitty mobile carriers were behaving that I just sat it out.
  - MarcelOlsz 7mo ago
    Hey at least you didn't aggressively "day trade" it all away with your idiot friends who moved in and tried to start a "fund". Good times.
    - hinkley 7mo ago
      I have decided that the “start investing early for compound interest” advice is actually a very clever white lie told to young adults everywhere. The point of starting early is not compound interest. It’s to experience loss when you still have a pittance in the market. The older you get the bigger the chunk of cash you can put in, and if you don’t understand Let it Ride and rebalancing before 20% is a loss of thousands instead of hundreds of dollars, you’re gonna have a bad time. The only compound interest that really matters is what you get when you have a substantial stake that you also haven’t blown up chasing fads or snake oil. So the advice is technically true but also technically beside the point.
  - nurettin 7mo ago
    In the beginning you didn't really buy BTC. You could mine a few off of your nvidia card in less than a week. I was focused on doing useless things like cracking md5 hashed passwords and didn't really believe you could pay for things with it. Regret on a different level.
    - tirant 7mo ago
      We used to tests servers before deploying them to customers and for that we ran intensive CPU software for days. I told my direct manager to mine bitcoin for fun. But he being a nerd for UFOs proposed to use Seti@Home. This was 2009, months after the official launch. We had extremely expensive servers with multi-cpu setups continuously running. We could have become easily one of the top miners nodes in the world back then. But instead we helped to proof the lack of alien communication towards the earth.
- dist-epoch 7mo ago
  But you were lucky. You were in the right places at the right time, just didn't realize it. This is lack of vision, not lack of luck.
- lelandfe 7mo ago
  Love it. This is all soo very Nelson Bighetti.
  - pstuart 7mo ago
    Nelson did quite fine in the end.
jibal 7mo ago
> people had not learned to make web pages Because there wasn't a widespread usable browser until Mosaic came along, 2 1/2 years after WWW.
donw 7mo ago
Something that just occurred to me: RAGs are almost Gopher for AIs.
cxr 7mo ago
> WAIS was[…] Gopher was[…] > You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane. You're mentioning formats and protocols but describing application UI designs.
- hackingonempty 7mo ago
  ...because they were apps. WAIS.app, Gopher.app, WWW.app

hinkley 7mo ago

My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row. I had a friend who was the most junior developer on the Mosaic team and one day he took me to his office to show me a text document with an image in the middle of it. In theory I met Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina that day but I just wanted to go do something with my friend. I did not get it. At all. A year later my girlfriend had to re-explain it to me and then another few months later I applied to work there in a support role. I don't think she knew what to do with the level of enthusiasm I wasn't bringing to this opportunity. A year after that I'm sitting in a bar after a tech convention in Chicago, wearing my Mosaic t-shirt, and someone said, 'where did you get that shirt?' When I told them we were on the team, you'd have thought I'd said we were Madonna's backup band. I never entirely understood that "I'd rather be lucky than good" sentiment until my luck ran out, and now I know.

FpUser 7mo ago
>"My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row." Ha, I missed so many great things. The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started. Luckily (or not) I am an easy going person and do not dwell on things.
- hinkley 7mo ago
  I could have retired making early iPhone apps but I was already so burned out on how shitty mobile carriers were behaving that I just sat it out.
- MarcelOlsz 7mo ago
  Hey at least you didn't aggressively "day trade" it all away with your idiot friends who moved in and tried to start a "fund". Good times.
  - hinkley 7mo ago
    I have decided that the “start investing early for compound interest” advice is actually a very clever white lie told to young adults everywhere. The point of starting early is not compound interest. It’s to experience loss when you still have a pittance in the market. The older you get the bigger the chunk of cash you can put in, and if you don’t understand Let it Ride and rebalancing before 20% is a loss of thousands instead of hundreds of dollars, you’re gonna have a bad time. The only compound interest that really matters is what you get when you have a substantial stake that you also haven’t blown up chasing fads or snake oil. So the advice is technically true but also technically beside the point.
- nurettin 7mo ago
  In the beginning you didn't really buy BTC. You could mine a few off of your nvidia card in less than a week. I was focused on doing useless things like cracking md5 hashed passwords and didn't really believe you could pay for things with it. Regret on a different level.
  - tirant 7mo ago
    We used to tests servers before deploying them to customers and for that we ran intensive CPU software for days. I told my direct manager to mine bitcoin for fun. But he being a nerd for UFOs proposed to use Seti@Home. This was 2009, months after the official launch. We had extremely expensive servers with multi-cpu setups continuously running. We could have become easily one of the top miners nodes in the world back then. But instead we helped to proof the lack of alien communication towards the earth.
dist-epoch 7mo ago
But you were lucky. You were in the right places at the right time, just didn't realize it. This is lack of vision, not lack of luck.
lelandfe 7mo ago
Love it. This is all soo very Nelson Bighetti.
- pstuart 7mo ago
  Nelson did quite fine in the end.

jibal 7mo ago

> people had not learned to make web pages Because there wasn't a widespread usable browser until Mosaic came along, 2 1/2 years after WWW.

donw 7mo ago

Something that just occurred to me: RAGs are almost Gopher for AIs.

cxr 7mo ago

> WAIS was[…] Gopher was[…] > You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane. You're mentioning formats and protocols but describing application UI designs.

hackingonempty 7mo ago
...because they were apps. WAIS.app, Gopher.app, WWW.app