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The Internet

The Tenth Birthday Of The World Wide Web 146

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-a-short-strange-trip-it's-been dept.
UoHCIC writes: "Excerpt from at A Little History of the World Wide Web " 17 May (1991) Presentation to "C5" Committee. General release of WWW on central CERN machines." This indicates that the Web was released to the world at large on May 17, 1991." Talk about fast moving: 10 years old, and just look at all the pr0n you can snarf. Imagine where we'll be at 20!
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The Tenth Birthday of the World Wide Web More

The Tenth Birthday of the World Wide Web

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  • 20th anniversary wishlist (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm hoping for arbitrary pr0n generated on-demand.
  • I know this girl I can set you up with Taco. She's really smart and fun to be with :-P
  • Probably not since LNUX doesn't exist now either as far as I can see.
  • I just wish your parents had chosen not to have you, but oh well, you can't get everything. There are reasons why they have that many children, primarily because it's the only thing that can keep them alive when they're older. It's also a good strategy to ensure your family lives on.

    "Lack of motivation" I think they have more motivation than you will ever have. Hey...let's do it like this. I colonize your country, take you and your family as slaves, then leave, creating a power vacuum in which civil war emerges, then when your home has been burned and plundered, and you're starving to death, I'll drop by and say "Hey...if you only had some more motivation you'd be fine". How about that?

  • People don't set up home on Barren Wasteland. that's why the Sahara and Siberia are so sparsely populated.

    However what tends to happen is that someone lives on a patch of fertile farmland which his family has maintained for centuries and suddenly someone else has a war and steals his entire crop 3 years in a row. They burn his fields and the surrounding forests which according to meteorologists reduces rainfall.

    Other people dam the river that fed his field etc...

    This all actually happened and what it dose is that what was a comfortable middle class village in Somalia or ethiopia 50 years ago is reduced to a few fathoms below abject poverty.

    When aid workers actually arrive they tend to find people dying of starvation hundreds of miles from home because they went searching for some kind of life and found the whole country a barren war ravaged wasteland without the usual stored crops or working irrigation network to keep you through the periodic droughts.
    --
    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
    Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.
  • even the IMG tag wasn't in the initial design, which says something about what they intended the web for!

    ASCII porn?
    __
  • in the university in May 1991, the sysadmin called a few students to demonstrate the web with Mosaic 0.9 or something like that, on his X workstation, we went on the Hawaï university site, and the CERN, and some others. At this moment almost all we had was 80x25 text console, doing irc, gopher, rn, etc, and we were wondering what the heck is this graphical stuff that will suck our bandwidth!!!
    --
  • It was the moment that Yahoo went from their Berkeley address to a .com. Anyone else remember when one would go to Yahoo to see if there was a new website up?
  • I realize that this is humor, but I thought I'd take a time out and add my 2 cents.

    I just simply browse with javascript off. It's simply not a power I wish to give to web sites. Like amazon loves to pop up junk every now and then. I'm much happier with javascript off. I simply turn it on when I absolutely must have it. (damn I wish mozilla would support prefs on a site per site basis already) 75% of the time when I visit a site and it needs javascript for a form submital or something equally retarded. I'll close just close the window and be on my merry way.

    Yes I realize javascript is useful for some things, but I've been programming web sites for over 2 years now in php/mysql and I've yet to run into a problem that absolutely REQUIRES javascript. I'll use it here and there for "enhancements", but it's never vital to the functionality of the site.

    Yeah, I realize that this is offtopic, but you can only say "Happy Birthday Web" in so many ways. Some articles just beg for tangents. :)


    ---

  • The internet I hope will not be controled even more by the government. Yet I believe that in the future we will have more thing on the internet to do but less rights to do them.
  • I was in 6th grade. Now I'm an 'Associate Software Engineer' working on multi-million dollar industrial control software. It's been an interesting 10 years :)
  • Three letters:
    A O L
  • Because your not paying $1/hr to use software, your paying $1/hr to use software that someone else has set up, and is fixing when it breaks.

    No, granted, microsoft is a evil entity and should be destroyed, but .NET is just network appliances built on top of open hardware.

    .NET will fail because it is propriatory, not because it costs money. Sunrays will fail because there propriaatory, and total cost will be insanly expensive cause you need Sun gear everywhere.

    But a paradime shift in how normal people deal with hardware and software is comming. And I for one, welcome it.

  • "10 years"? big deal! (Score:5)

    by woggo ( 11781 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @06:39AM (#217213) Journal
    187 years ago, "Norway" was invented. "Norway" is a virtual community where people can "treffe venner" (meet friends), "gaa paa kino" (watch cinema), even "spise reindyrsfilet" (eat reindeer). Unlike the web, which is organized by "links", Norway is organized by "roads" and "fjords". Instead of "clicking" on a "link", one can "drive" on a "road" to get to a new destination or take the "hurtigruta" to a different fjord. Like the web, however, Norway is somewhat balkanized -- there are over 37 dialects of its markup language, "Norwegian".

    In any case, Glad Syttendemai til internet venner vaaren i Norge!

    For more information on Norway's constitution day, please visit here (in English): 17.mai [home.sol.no]

  • Ok, let's look at the technology.

    The web was invented in 1991, and Cacading Style Sheets (CSS1) were standardized in 1996. MSIE6 and Mozilla 1.0 are just getting /close/ to having a full CSS1 implementation this year.

    That means it has taken half the total life of the web to get user-agent support for even the most basic of web standards. I was working on the web when CSS1 was standardized, and I remember being so excited and waiting to use them in my web pages. I have been waiting a long time.

    But I feel the same way about the standards being released today...SVG for example is really cool and I can't wait to use it. The problem is that many of the specifications coming out today are exponentially or at least logarithmically as complex as the ones that came out earlier. Take a look at XML Schema for a good example of this.

    Being burned by my continued wait even for wide spread CSS1 deployment, I shudder to think how long it is going to take to have decent implementations of standards being produced today. I will probably have to wait until 2020 before I can serve up an XML page with inline SVG styled with CSS3.

    So yeah, whenever anyone makes an outlandish technology prediction about 10 years from now...I can't help but think about this. I know I am being a cynic. I'm going to shut up and going back to isolating and filing CSS1 bugs and test cases for Mozilla :-)
  • Happy Independence Day, Norway!!!!


  • somebody wrote:
    >>Talk about fast moving: 10 years old, and just look at all the pr0n you can snarf. Imagine where we'll be at 20!
    and unformed wrote:
    >umm...if i remember correctly, porn was a LOT easier to grab when the net was only 6-7 years old....before the Cyber Decency Act kicked in...

    umm ... if i remember correctly, the Communications Decency Act was struck down by the US Supreme Court [epic.org] nearly three years ago. Whatchu talkin' bout, Willis?

    You may be thinking of the Child Online Protection Act [epic.org], which is presently being challenged at the Appeals Court level, with a review of the decision overturning it possible. But the COPA has been under injunction by an Appeals judge since 1998 [epic.org].

    It can be a little hard to get to porn from certain libraries [eff.org] and other public institutions, and child pornography enforcement [fbi.gov] has stepped up (even while occasionally stomping on some Constitutional fingers), but in general porn remains as available as ever.

    (Are you sure you're reading the real news, and not just Slashdot? I know from the editorial accuracy around here it would be hard to keep up.)

    Oh, I see, you meant porn you didn't have to PAY for. Well, no wonder.
    ----
    lake effect [lakefx.nu] weblog
  • CmdrTaco's bizarre references to porn are getting quite frequent... first the biofeedback joysticks and now his own personal tribute to the web.

    I think it's only a matter of time till /. opens popups to poopsex.com when you try and close your browser...

    They call me Moe

  • Think there will be enough porn "actresses" and "models" to keep up with the demand if there's more porn sites than people (and more people that porn workers)?
  • Anyone can grab an AOL CD and get online, put their web page up and chat to people across the world
    Anyone with a computer can, anyway. That's still far too small a percentage of the population of any western country; taken as a percentage of the world's population, it's ridiculous.
    I know that these are still early days, and the fact that the phrase 'digital divide' enjoys currency is testament to the fact that people are at least aware of the problem. But there's a long, long way to go. The web is, I suppose, a reflection of the rest of the world, and it won't be truly egalitarian until individual governments ensure that their respective populations can afford computers (and food). And we all know how likely that is in the next twenty years.

  • between then and now (Score:3)

    by MS ( 18681 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @06:12AM (#217220)
    At about half way between 1991 and now, there are some interesting numbers:
    • (1969): birth of the Internet
    • 1991: birth of the World-Wide Web (Yes, then it was written with a "-" between the 1st and 2nd word)
    • 1993: 90% of the webbrowsers were XMosaic (running on Unix), the rest were linemode browsers and some exotic homemade browsers (I too developed one - today unfortunately unusable!)
    • 1994: 70% of all webservers run on SunOS/Solaris, the rest are HP-UX, SGI, AIX and some other Unices (no Microsoft OS on the radar)
    • 1995: 25.000.000 Internet users (now we are about 400.000.000)
    • 1996: 90% of all browsers are Netscape
    • 2001: 70% of the Internet users use MSIE
    • 2001: 75% of the webservers run on Linux or some Unix variant (still Microsoft has eaten only around 20% of the server cake)

    Enjoy it!
    Markus

  • Wow... the www has the same birthday as me! Strange that I never noticed it before...

    --
    It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
    - Sean
  • how dare you list all that dial-up software without listing the king of dial-up software, that which is Telemate.

    Telemate is god.
  • Yes they have; it was even mentioned in the intro. pr0n appears to be a profitable web business for some (or many).

  • A backbone more than ten ago (Score:4)

    by JJ ( 29711 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @04:13AM (#217224) Homepage Journal
    Computers were certainly interconnected more than a decade ago. I courted my first wife via DARPA and she's been gone for more than a decade.
  • The internet has been around since 1969 and is 32 years old this year.

    dave
  • It was September 1993, the September that never ended.

    Traditionally, each september would see USENET fill up with new students who'd acts like twits for a while until they got up to speed with the conventions of netiquette. When AOL started, there was a continuous influx of twits.

    dave

  • you're not very good at looking.
    ...dave
  • i dont think rob's hurting for money currently.

    use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
  • man usenet has always been the place for things like porn and mp3s. as long as it's not userfriendly enough for senators and lars to use it will remain that way.

    use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
  • I was finishing my PhD in HEP. I remember browsing info.cern.ch with a VT100. sigh.... And Led Zep wrote the lyrics for today a long time ago: "Ten Years Gone"
  • No, perhaps not. And yet hundreds of companies of any size, many of whom will never be sexy enough to make Business 2.0 or the Standard, have added enormous value and productivity to their company by using this medium as a tool within a successful business model instead of relying on the medium itself as the business model.
  • An interesting mention about style sheets on this page [w3.org] about the NeXT browser/editor TBL was demonstrating...

    Even if that wasn't in the same context as what we've come to use as CSS now, I wonder why the separation of content from presentation took so long to come around (and is STILL not 100% properly implemented by major browsers) and how it got so far off track around, say, 1996 and the 2.0 browsers.
  • exactly my point, its an enhancement, unless your a hosting company.... then it makes sense that the web if your medium.
  • I knew I should have started a pr0n site a few years back when my old friend Renee decided she wanted to get paid to make "movies". I was sitting on a gold mine, damnit!

  • and yet dot coms fail (Score:3)

    by nuintari ( 47926 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @03:45AM (#217235) Homepage
    its ten years old, and yet no one has discovered a viable bussiness model for the internet based company.
  • I was still on BBS's.

    I was on BBS's until they finally gave up the ghost here in nashville.

    I miss BBSing. It was a much closer-knit community. I'll never forget the nights of attempting to redial my favorite bbs until i *FINALLY* got connected.. just to grab a .qwk packet and spend the next day or so replying to message after message after message..

    The net just hasn't touched the same nerve with me. While the information resources are much more grand, there arent many places which offer the same type of atmosphere as a local BBS. People weren't bombarded with ads from local BBS's, it took a fair amount of clue to be able to get one one, for god sakes - Telix, Terminate, procomm, minicom and tip, bluewave and iceedit, renegade and wildcat. Modemfests and gatherings and making friends and enemies through a highly delayed message board.. memories.. *sigh*

    Oh, sorry... Nostalgia kicked in.
  • Someone send me a card. It's my birthday too. Trent Reznor's as well.

    I turned 19 today. Hoooooray!
  • Not to mention giving you debilitating illnesses which your government and international orginizations are powerless to cure, and thus removing from you even the physical ability to work.

    Yes perhaps the citizens of the third world can be critizised as being at fault for some of their misfortunes, but i'll be damned if any American who owns a car, enjoys police protection and was raised on three meals a day and antibiotics will do it.
  • what would you say was the defining moment that facilitated public consumption of the technology?

    For me it was the release of a usable mosaic, and not too long after that, yahoo [yahoo.com]. I don't remember when mosaic was released, but I remember downloading it and skipping around to different people's web sites. I also remember thinking to myself that this thing was interesting but that it probably wouldn't catch on. Usenet had a nice indexing system in that there were groups identified by interest. So if you had a paritcular interest, you could find resources on Usenet by looking at the names of the groups. But there was no such mechanism with mosaic (I called it "mosaic" at the time for lack of better understanding of what drove it).

    So much for my prognostication. I now predict that any predictions from me are sketchy at best. (This bit of self reference brought to you by "Godel, Escher, Bach".)

  • Re:using it for good, or just using it (Score:4)

    by bachelor3 ( 68410 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @04:03AM (#217240)
    One of the questions [w3.org] from the presentation:

    If everyone can make any links he wants, doesn't the whole thing become a hopeless mess?

    yes :)

  • Internet is not the same of the web. The internet is actually older.

    But I see your point. :)
  • I was in 8th grade, dreaming with space travels and video games. And I was a big fan of Chun Li.

    In December 1991, I decided that I'll become a computer programmer, and now I'm here.

    In May 1996, I set up my first homepage, in Geocities. Five years and I still don't have a decent web site. (Though you may disagree :))

  • LOL (Score:1)

    by locoluis ( 69948 )
    And yet I'm still not understanding why they like pr0n... :)
  • When I entered PUC [www.puc.cl], they had one of the two bigger subnets of my country, Chile. It was a whole class B, and they still own it.

    The first day, internet was alien to me, but as I had some previous computing knowledge, I quickly started to use it regularly.

    I discovered the web that day. A week after that, I discovered the USENET, and two months after that, I set up my first web page at Geocities, and the rest is history.
  • What government?
  • Timothy Berners-Lee was presented with an honorary Doctor of Law degree at Columbia University's 247th commencement ceremonies yesterday, May 16th, 2001. He is listed in the program as "Inventor of the Web".
  • Try this w3.org's Web page [w3.org].

  • ME TOO

    remember?

  • I seem to remember that the web really took off and newsgroups became unusable when AOL and Compuserve became popular. That was around 95/96. We, academics, suddenly became the minority and we hated it. AOLer became a common insult. Those were the days!

  • 1994. I was just out of graduate school and teaching physical science in my hometown. I had made friends with an officer from the Naval Postgraduate School [navy.mil] who was also an Amateur Radio operator (N7HPR [tapr.org]). It would be a year before Netcom would provide dialup for a 14.4 modem, so his ability to dial-in from home with a "secure" line to a Linux box he set up at NPS was novel. He used Trumpet WinSock and NCSA Mosaic, and we stayed up all night playing. It blew my mind, and we both knew what we wanted to do with it: Educate. I never thought anybody would pay me to play that way. The Web was going to be an avocation; they're fools to pay us to do what we do.

    This was on the heals of learning about email. I had an account in grad school, but not enough peers in my field had one, so it was rarely used. It wasn't until I had to build a packet radio station while living in Hawaii for two years that I really appreciated digital communications. A letter to my Dad would take a couple of days to hop from the islands to California, no better than the pony express but saving us a great deal in phone bills. Sure helped my Dad understand the concept when I convinced him to get one of those Netcom accounts years later.

  • At this link [netcraft.com] that says that www.transactie.org has been online for 1142 days.

  • I think Win95 made a BIG difference... although for me, I had a copy of Trumpet Winsock around for a long time before I had Windows 95!
  • It did, it really did eat the net. Now I watch and wait for the Web Eater to come. It will, maybe in the form of Quake-ish interface, but it will come.

    Two dimensions with pictures and (rare, but always painful) sounds. Plugins that come and go. It's not really an enhancement of the preceeding Gopher.

    The net demands more dimension, without having to chug even more bandwidth. Content per byte has certainly diminished in the last 10 years.
  • I first "saw" the Web at a technical conference held by the Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh in August 1994, right as I was starting as a graduate student at CMU. The first time I saw Mosaic, it was like, "wow, that's it - that's the interface we've been waiting for, it's going to change everything." I think there were something like 10000 sites on the entire Web at that point; not much more. Our class (of 10) had a "home page" contest, which I actually won, for little more reason than that I had multiple pages linked together, and had more topical links than anyone else. :-) What was it then, HTML 2.0? No Javascript, no DHTML, just straight-text early-day HTML and a little CGI on the side.

    Why is it that about half the time, I feel like we had more content then than we do now?

    Oh well, just another old geezer reminiscing about the good old days, I guess. Of course, back then, Usenet still had a S/N ratio > 0, too...

  • Re:Interesting historical note... (Score:3)

    by frankie ( 91710 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @06:25AM (#217255) Journal
    public at large had not truly begun to adopt the technology until perhaps 1996.

    1996, you say? Interesting. The High Performance Computing Act [ed.gov] of 1991 paid for increasing network backbone infrastructure over the next 5 years. Perhaps there's a connection? However, I seem to remember some guy [salon.com] getting a whole lot of shit for taking credit.

    TCP/IP [ais.org]. HTTP. graphical web browsers [uiuc.edu]. What do these things have in common? Answer: they were all created with government funding.


  • Oh of course...junk mail never existed before the net. And child pr0n? invented in 1991 as well. Don't be such a sucker for the popular media - the net is a mechanism, nothing more nothing less. It lets people share things, what they choose to share tells you about the people, not the mechanism.

  • Imagine the presentation (Score:3)

    by Dr_Cheeks ( 110261 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @03:52AM (#217257) Homepage Journal
    Tim Berners-Lee (or whoever): In 10 years time trolls will be surfing Slashdot putting sporks in first posts while browsing goatsex in another window.

    CERN Committee: Eh? OK Tim, um, sounds great...

  • Trying to find something on the internet is like searching for the page you need in a library hit by a hurricane...


    ...with the lights turned out.

  • I had just accepted my current job. My second day here, the head librarian asked me to set up a machine with modem. Then we sat down and started "playing" with mosaic, gopher and archie. Six years later all machines on campus have highspeed access via the campus network.
  • go from freedom, openness to opression, regulation, totalitarianism?

    Bjarne
  • this story is about the www, not the internet... of course you are right, though. the internet was indeed around before the www... not sure what your post has to do with this discussion other than to help proliferate the idea that www==internet. i apologize if i seem harsh this morning... no coffee in the office :(
  • You're just mad because your wife read that article too and started looking over your shoulder when you were on the computer.

  • Re:and yet dot coms fail (Score:5)

    by Nonac ( 132029 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @04:18AM (#217263) Journal
    The web was not designed as a business platform.

    The web is an astounding success. It was designed to facilitate communication, and it has done that. Don't let the fact that a few mba types are upset that they can't make money off of it detract from its success.

    When a company goes broke because its business plan is based on the notion that people will buy products because they are sold on the web, that is not a failing of the web; it is a failing of the business.

  • 10th birthday nostalgia. Spiked (Score:5)

    by TomV ( 138637 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @04:33AM (#217264)
    $ telnet info.cern.ch

    SunOS 5.6

    login: www
    Password:
    Login incorrect

    OK, try a modern browser pointed at the same address...
    Sorry, the hypertext and WWW information is no longer available on the info.cern.ch site. The physical machine no longer exists. Please refer to one of the new sites described below
    Inevitable, obvious, but still a little bit sad. Can anyone remember how many logins there were for www at info.cern.ch (i seem to recall it was about 20)?

    I've still got a printout somewhere, about 10 pages of 6-point print but it was, at the time (late 1993) "the complete list of world-wide-web servers".

    All .edu, .gov, .mil, .net or countrycodes (mainly .ac.*). Still no such thing as .com.

    Just unthinkable only 8 years later.

    Progress, eh?

    TomV

  • Yeah, JeffK [somethingawful.com] 0wns the www.
  • You just don't have the right sites, ask Taco, I'm sure he's got a list to share :)
  • umm...if i remember correctly, porn was a LOT easier to grab when the net was only 6-7 years old....before the Cyber Decency Act kicked in...

    That may be true for those who only casually delve into the dank depths of the pornographic underworld, but since then pr0n has been corraled into more specific locations; salacious IRC channels, usenet (though that's really a pain), and all about independent ftp servers.

    Not only is it more abundant, and more concentrated, but it is also of higher quality. 4 years is a long time for improvements in digital photography and scanning equipment.
  • let's have a 10 popup window salute!

    go to your favorite pr0n site... then press the "Back" button
  • Blockquoth the poster:
    Without them there would have been an ever-increasing knowledge gap between the elite "haves" and the masses of "have-nots".
    Um, we still have that knowledge gap. The vast majority of people who use AOL work on faith and believe in magic... they don't know much about what's going on inside their machines.

    If you don't like this system, move to Cuba.
    Ah, yes, that's the productive way to run a system: Force out anyone who spots a flaw, so that the system never need improve.
  • Maybe in 10 year there won't be much pr0n on the net because everyone reached saturation levels and got bored with it! .... maybe not.... >:)
  • I was hanging out in gopherspace, listening to my friends brag about hypertext and I was jealous because my PC wasn't capable of 'graphics'. Hmmm... amazingly, I still use pine for email.

  • to celebrate (Score:5)

    by enrico_suave ( 179651 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @04:03AM (#217272) Homepage
    let's have a 10 popup window salute!

    E.
  • Well, if you define "Proper" as making big bucks on the internet, fine. Otherwise i'd guess more then 1% is using it for something "proper".

    Email is a great thing, as is the "www". Easy access to information in a fast and simple way. Thats proper to me :) Communication, with friends and others, booking tickets, buying stuff online, searching, newsgroups... Thats pretty proper i'd say... And more then 1 % online are using those services :)

  • Gotta interject here...

    Do you know how your car works? Or your fridge? Maybe a slot machine?

    99% of people simply need to know insert gas here or put food into me to stay fresh (extra credit -- guess which one applies to what). Thats why we have mechanics and Maytag men. Just becauase we're all geeks and actually want to know how the world works, doesn't mean everyone does. In fact, I guarantee we're in the minority.

  • I worked at a daily newspaper from 1994 on, and it wasn't until maybe 1996-97 that we were able to refer to the Internet without defining the term.
  • my slashdot is set to text only. when i first used the internet, it was on netscape. i used to hate getting on pages with pictures as they always took too long to load. nowdays, it's not just pictures ... but flash. how i long for the good old days.... then again ... this is what the internet's about ... otherwise, we'd all be using gopher.
  • I hate this argument. Let make sure every third world country has all the advantages we have.

    Here's an idea, maybe the people that setup homes in barren wastelands and then decide to have a couple dozen kids should not be saved. It's cruel, but be realistic.
  • It's not like it's a car accident. They chose to have children despite their situation and their lack of motivation to correct it.
  • I'll drop by and say "Hey...if you only had some more motivation you'd be fine". How about that?

    Sounds good to me. It's called survival. If that much shit happens to me, I should either find a way to survive or I'll die. Being a human completely capable of adapting, I should be able to accept that. So instead of learning the latest programming language, I'll have to learn how to be a carpenter and make myself a hut as well as how to hunt for animals instead of software bugs.

    It's called life. Who the hell decided the way Americans live is the way everybody should live?

    I work so I can do better than just get by. I work so my children can have a future as well as myself. Having to start from scratch wouldn't change that motivation.

  • Moore's Law of Porn (Score:5)

    by tenzig_112 ( 213387 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @04:01AM (#217286) Homepage
    As soon as the CERN machines began running rudamentary http daemons, porns sites began popping up. But every eighteen months their number doubled.

    Er, wait. Make that every six months their number doubled. That way we end up with more than 2 million from an original 10 [estimates].

    That way, after another 10 years, the web will be choking under the weight of 6.871947e+11 porn sites, many times more than the projected population of the Earth.

    [Something to think about.]

  • Ack! Did anyone remember to send Al Gore a card!?!?!?

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • Taco needs to get laid! This is his second [slashdot.org] reference to pr0n on /. in nine hours!

    (Don't get me wrong, I can sympathize)

  • regarding pr0n (Score:3)

    by unformed ( 225214 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @03:52AM (#217295)
    Talk about fast moving: 10 years old, and just look at all the pr0n you can snarf. Imagine where we'll be at 20!

    umm...if i remember correctly, porn was a LOT easier to grab when the net was only 6-7 years old....before the Cyber Decency Act kicked in...
  • Two consecutive articles, two references to pornography. CowboyNeal on the rag or something?
  • OK, so it could be argues that it was the advent of the graphical web browser, but that doesn't seem to fit with the usage spikes in the timeline. The NCSA Mosaic browser was around for years before the public got wind of the web. Was it the netscape IPO, I don't think so. Perhaps it was the inclusion of a TCP stack in Windows 95 (as much as it pains me to give Microsoft credit...)


    --
  • > Um, we still have that knowledge gap. The vast majority
    > of people who use AOL work on faith and believe in magic...
    > they don't know much about what's going on inside their machines.

    You're right, of course, but the point is that they're using those machines, where ten years ago nobody without a large degree of acumen even went near them. As much as I despise AOL, it does provide the "have-nots" with impetus for getting to know the basics so they can get online.

    > Ah, yes, that's the productive way to run a system:
    > Force out anyone who spots a flaw, so that the system never need improve.

    Not exactly. The system did "improve" (I quote the term since I don't know if going to a paid-by-advertising model is an improvement, but at least it's economically viable) and now this user is lamenting the change. His comment is, "if you don't like how the system has changed to stay operable, leave it." The flaw in this case is the person who says advertising sucks without providing a realistic alternative.

    One last note: "Blockquoth" is a great term. I plan to use it on occasion.

    Virg
  • Damn, you beat me to it. Wish I had a mod point for you.

    Virg
  • > Check out those screenshots of the first browser-editor-wp
    > extension. We've hardly moved at all.

    Yeah, the last time I logged into battle.net to play Diablo II online, I thought to myself, "this is so much like Lynx!" Here's a good general rule: on networks where the content is the reason you get on the network, more is better. We've moved quite a lot, in fact.

    Virg
  • > Anyone know of a source of tech. news that is run by people
    > with some sense of decency and morality?

    I thought you'd guess by now. People with a sense of decency and morality don't run tech news web sites. :)

    Virg

  • The WWW is the cause of all our...Whoa! (Score:3)

    by virg_mattes ( 230616 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @06:10AM (#217306)
    > Before the web came along, the internet was the home
    > of intelligent discussion, and academic research. It
    > was a wonderful means of communication.

    Two things: first, the intelligent folk still gather on the Internet, and second, it's still a wonderful means of communication. I'm a member of a Moot that's entirely email-based, and I therefore have opportunities to discuss topics I'd never otherwise know with very smart people I'd never otherwise meet. I can converse for free with my friends who live hundreds of miles from me, and my father and I often share online games.

    > Suddenly the WWW appeared. This ended this golden era.

    "Golden era"?!? I think I'd have to argue with you there. I ran a BBS for many years, and I thoroughly enjoyed the sense of community that it engendered, but I don't look back on my BBS days with longing to return to the "golden age". Perhaps you're glossing over the fact that there was so much less available on the pre-1991 Internet, or perhaps you have no need for, and therefore no appreciation of, what out there now.

    > Everyone wanted the internet. The media got a hold on the idea
    > and it has never been possible to explain to them the difference
    > between the web and the internet since. No more research is interesting
    > to anyone unless its web based. This network has been reduced to
    > another tool for the corporations to force their content onto us.

    It's okay that everyone wants the Internet, it's not their fault that the mainstream media confuses WWW and the Internet, and since non-WWW research is (I'm guessing) interesting to you, and it's certainly of interest to me, you can't very well make statements that nobody cares about anything but the Web. And also, you're assuming a lot to say the the only use of the WWW is as a corporate propaganda tool. There's a lot out there that isn't corporate, and saying that the influx of advertising and other content by business has spoiled the Web is very much like saying that roads serve no use other than as a repository for billboards.

    > The last hope for a free populace was eliminated, because
    > the sheeple just wanted another form of passive entertainment.

    Ah, here's the rub. "How dare those sheeple demand that the Internet give them anything other than what I deem appropriate" is your message. How very elitist of you. How odd that your statement so closely reflects the lamentation of the Women's Temperance League about how bawdy stories and romance novels had ruined libraries as a repository of higher knowledge and drawn the unwashed masses into their doors. You are right to assume that some people want the Web to be just another form of passive entertainment. You are wrong, however, to assume that all users that use and enjoy the Web are sheeple that don't know any better than to be led around by their credit cards.

    I've been working with (and on) the Internet since my school days almost twenty years ago, and I don't seem to recall any "golden age" back then. It was usually a big pain in the ass, mostly because of "more learned than you" types like yourself. Get over it, and try the Web for real. You might enjoy what you find.

    Virg
  • We should all light a candle and take a picture from outerspace to represent the current structure of the WWW. This is cool news.

    Seeka
  • I would say that approximately 30% of the stuff we worked on at CERN has been realized. The commercial side of the web has caused it to grow fast in some areas (most notably executable size), it has also hindered some developments.

    Cascading Style Sheets were originally developed by Hakon Lie in 1994. Netscape were not interested in the idea at all, they wanted to tie lots of proprietary features to HTML that would lock people into their browser. CSS would make it easy for sites to support both Netscape and IE, so they were firmly against them.

    Netscape were also against tables initially. They considered them unnecessary, the real problem was that their parser was yacc based and support for the tables syntax was really hard. They had been taught all the LR(1) stuff in comp sci class but did not realize that since Goldfarb would not have known an LR(1) grammar from a poke in the eye with a sharp stick attempts to parse SGML with an LR(1) parser are doomed to failure since SGML is context sensitive.

    Instead of useful stuff like CSS we got a crappy scripting language that for the first three years was so baddly implemented that many browsers would crash when they hit the wrong type of javascript.

    The CSS problem could have worked better if the content negotiation scheme had been implemented properly. WAP has a workable scheme, most HTML browsers do not.

    My view was (and still is) that the style sheet should be applied on the server side and that web authoring tools such as Frontpage should support both direct entry of text in XML and design of XSL stylesheet converters. I have yet to see a decent package that does not cost a ridiculous amount.

    Hopefully the tenth birthday will at least put a stop to those stupid 'Internet Time' stories written by sad hacks with no brains. If the development of the Web was any slower it would grind to a halt. Trying to get anything done still takes at least a year. Paint dries faster.

  • How is the fact that they enabled the Webification of thousands of pinks and high school girls who just want to chat and meet guys--how is that a GOOD thing?

    So what, should only the priviliged few be allowed to be online? How is that a good thing? We live in a modern democracy in which everyone is supposed to be able to have the same opportunities, and services like AOL provided that. Without them there would have been an ever-increasing knowledge gap between the elite "haves" and the masses of "have-nots".

    All it does is justify the existance of things like doubleclick and other garbage-producing companies.

    What the hell is wrong with advertising? Without it you wouldn't be reading this site and posting such nonsense, because it wouldn't exist. If you don't like this system, move to Cuba.

  • Let's hope it carries on getting better (Score:4)

    by sharkticon ( 312992 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @04:04AM (#217325)

    At this landmark occasion in the web's history we can look back and see just how much things have changed, and for the better, in the last ten years.

    To start with, the web was an academic project to allow scientists to communicate more easily without the limitations of email. Since then it has grown massively, shedding the ivory tower textual paradigm to become the most popular part of the net by far, and the driving force behind the massive growth in the amount of people who have net access, a thing which we all agree is good.

    Nowadays the web is a reflection of modern life rather than a bastion for the priviliged few. Anyone can grab an AOL CD and get online, put their web page up and chat to people across the world, and without services like AOL we would still be stuck in the situation we had in 93, where there was a marked lack of content and none of the features we take for granted nowadays. Heck, even the IMG tag wasn't in the initial design, which says something about what they intended the web for!

    I'm hoping that the continuing growth in ordinary, real people coming online will further fuel the technological advances that have made the web such an interesting place today, and that cheaper and faster access will mean another explosion in useful content for us all.

  • And again (Score:5)

    by sharkticon ( 312992 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @05:08AM (#217326)

    Um, we still have that knowledge gap. The vast majority of people who use AOL work on faith and believe in magic... they don't know much about what's going on inside their machines.

    More elitism. Why should everyone have to know how their computers work? The fact that people encounter difficulties through not having such knowledge is a flaw in computer systems, not the people using them. Technology after all, should be our tool rather than our master, which is why Windows is still far better on the desktop than Linux.

  • Re:using it for good, or just using it (Score:3)

    by dinivin ( 444905 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @04:04AM (#217334)
    10 years, and only 1% of all users have found out how to do something proper with it.

    What do you define as proper?

    Frankly, I'd be more disturbed by the fact that indoor plumbing as been around for hundreds (thousands, really) of years, but millions of people (if not billions of people) still don't have that simple "luxury." Or that we've been able to control the flow of electricty for centuries, but billions of people still don't seen to have that simple luxury, either. Maybe we should worry about getting people up to the basics before we start worrying about the fact that so few people have found a proper use of the world wide web.

    Dinivin

  • Does anyone know.... (Score:4)

    by actiondan ( 445169 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @07:18AM (#217335)

    ... what the oldest page on the web is?

    That is, the page that has been available on the web continuously and without change for the longest time.

    Alternatively - what is the oldest server on the internet? That is - the server that has been continuously connected to the internet (preferably at the same IP) for the longest time.

    Suggestions anyone?
  • Norway is so far ahead in technology, that we chose to make the birth of the web our national day...

  • using it for good, or just using it (Score:4)

    by rassie ( 452841 ) on Thursday May 17, 2001 @03:45AM (#217342)
    10 years, and only 1% of all users have found out how to do something proper with it.

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