August 06, 2006

"The vision was that people should not have to deal with the technology stuff." The BBC marks the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Except...

posted by PatB 18 years ago
  • That is SO last year. Or was it the year before?
  • Timeline Favorite quote: "Usenet lacked any kind of persistence so anyone making a point had to re-post their opinions regularly."
  • Except... That is SO last year. Or was it the year before? Well, it depends on if you usually start counting a thing's age from the moment of first planning for it, the moment of conception, or the moment it is born (the instance it joins the rest of the world). I would use birth as a standard myself, because sometimes the other two instances may be harder to pinpoint or define.
  • Wouldn't that depend on how you define 'the rest of the world?'
  • I would define "rest of the world" to be people not involved in the creation of it. There may be other ways to define it, but I can't imagine a reasonable definition that doesn't include the same set of people.
  • a reasonable definition *twitches* Ok. I think I may have done this wrong. All I really wanted to do was say 'YAY!" and celebrate a thing that is, to me, the most amazing, wonderful, exciting, annoying thing to happen in my lifetime. I jumped on the bandwagon right after Mozilla arrived. That's right. I have a PC. Always have. To me, the WWW didn't even begin to be world wide until it was accessible to people who had something other than NeXT software. Which means when *I* got on the web. Lame, I know. But there it is.
  • Sorry. I didn't mean to rain on your thread.
  • Other than NeXT software? I was using LYNX to browse the web in text only (didn't see what the big deal was vs the goffer client I was using). I signed up for the Delphi service to gain access to it, since they were the only service I could find that would let me connect to the internet (for a massive per minute fee). The fact I first was using my Commodore 64 to connect to Delphi over my 2400 modem then using the goffer or lynx, meant my choices were limited. When I upgraded to an Amiga and a faster modem, I could finally use a real ISP (Eskimo North in Seattle) to use thier Shell and a real Mosaic graphical browser.