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Well sure, if you're going to take it literally, the foundation of the internet has more to do with software and Linux and TCP than advertising. The fact is th

by Jgrubb 14y ago

Well sure, if you're going to take it literally, the foundation of the internet has more to do with software and Linux and TCP than advertising. The fact is though, and I'm surprised to find that I must be the only HN regular who finds himself working in the world of marketing and advertising, that a hell of a lot of the internet and people working on making it better, not just worse, is paid for by advertising money. The vitriol that's on display from everybody on this thread is, in a big way, as myopic and ignorant and full of self-righteousness as the guy they're calling names (who I agree is all of the above, yes).

johnsoft 14y ago
"Some sites nowadays depend on advertising as a revenue stream," is a far cry from "The Internet was created on the foundations of advertising." Reading through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet, if I had to guess what motivated the people who worked on those early networks, I would say it had more to do with the potential to advance humanity with accessible, near-instant communication than it did the ability to serve ads to people. Ads were not on anyone's mind when they first saw text appear in real-time from thousands of miles away. Ads were just a single application for the new technology, and they came about much later.
hhw 14y ago
Don't you mean BSD rather than Linux, as BSD was the reference TCP/IP implementation for DARPA?
Samuel_Michon 14y ago
“the foundation of the internet has more to do with software and Linux” Linux is barely 20 years old, the Internet has been around for decades before that. In recent years, it seems like more and more people are using ‘Linux’ in a context where they actually mean ‘Unix’. Just like the Internet and the web are not the same, these distinctions matter. “ I must be the only HN regular who finds himself working in the world of marketing and advertising” Nope, there are plenty of us here.
sesqu 14y ago
Ads appeared in the late 90's. That's a far cry from even being the foundation of the web. Ads are very important to the web as it exists, but to claim anything foundational is just ignorant. Formative could be argued, though.

by Jgrubb 14y ago

johnsoft 14y ago

"Some sites nowadays depend on advertising as a revenue stream," is a far cry from "The Internet was created on the foundations of advertising." Reading through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet, if I had to guess what motivated the people who worked on those early networks, I would say it had more to do with the potential to advance humanity with accessible, near-instant communication than it did the ability to serve ads to people. Ads were not on anyone's mind when they first saw text appear in real-time from thousands of miles away. Ads were just a single application for the new technology, and they came about much later.

hhw 14y ago

Don't you mean BSD rather than Linux, as BSD was the reference TCP/IP implementation for DARPA?

Samuel_Michon 14y ago

“the foundation of the internet has more to do with software and Linux” Linux is barely 20 years old, the Internet has been around for decades before that. In recent years, it seems like more and more people are using ‘Linux’ in a context where they actually mean ‘Unix’. Just like the Internet and the web are not the same, these distinctions matter. “ I must be the only HN regular who finds himself working in the world of marketing and advertising” Nope, there are plenty of us here.

sesqu 14y ago

Ads appeared in the late 90's. That's a far cry from even being the foundation of the web. Ads are very important to the web as it exists, but to claim anything foundational is just ignorant. Formative could be argued, though.