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Comment by l_t | Hacker News Reader

This makes me wonder, though.

I wonder if you went back to the very earliest days of the WWW, did everyone see it as a toy? Or were there already people (those developing it, perhaps) who saw that it had awesome non-toy potential?

I suspect people brand new tech as "toys" when they're not, and I bet there's also developers that take their toys and call them products :)

Maybe the solution is to completely discard the "toy" / "non-toy" dichotomy. It seems like it just muddies the discussion when the important thing is to evaluate the actual merits of the product/technology in question.

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> I wonder if you went back to the very earliest days of the WWW, did everyone see it as a toy?

The WWW that was created to share scientific papers? Or you mean the GP's Internet that was created to organize the US troops on the event of a nuclear strike?

I guess so, there was plenty of people aware they were not toys. Most of those people did use them as toys most of the times, like everybody else at the time, but the toy classification was mostly from uninformed people and trolls.

I meant the WWW. Thanks for checking!

>The WWW that was created to share scientific papers?

Most of the citizens of the western world (even those with a degree) definitely pidgeon-hole expensive university projects as "toys", because they don't have one and don't see a need for one.

Academia is a weird place and is often underestimated.

Just as a side note: the Internet was not actually created to organize US troops in the event of a nuclear strike. The Internet, the one initially birthed by ARPA, initially had academic and civilian aims. That said, some of the early research on networking was developed to aid the military in case of nuclear war. In particular, Paul Baran invented package switching explicitly to help the US air force maintain its defense radar network in case of war.

That was in fact the impetus:

While working at RAND on a scheme for U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to survive a “first strike,” Paul Baran conceived of the Internet and digital packet switching, the Internet's underlying data communications technology. His concepts are still employed today; just the terms are different. His seminal work first appeared in a series of RAND studies published between 1960 and 1962 and then finally in the tome “On Distributed Communications,” published in 1964.

https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html

Baran's original packet (block) switched networks development papers, and in fact his entire catalogue, are available at RAND:

"On Distributed Communications I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks"

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html

(This and the others are listed at the first link.)

Random, single data point 80's person here.

Compuserve, AOL and newsgroups were already big when I discovered the www - Compuserve and newsgroups seemed vastly superior to me at the time.

Netscape Navigator seemed so basic, and how would anyone know which URLs to use (discoverability)? I chuckled, wrote it off, and stuck with what I knew.

Well, I was just a little bit wrong :)

I was in college in the mid-90s. I don't know anyone who saw it as a toy. We'd already been using Pine and BBS for many years prior and this seemed like the next iteration of that. The first time I saw the WWW was when I was in a computer lab and someone was on ESPN (or some other sport's website) on the computer next to me. I leaned over and asked them what they were looking at. They showed me what a browser is and how you go to web pages. I tried it out and was hooked. I immediately started to try to make my own webpages. Of course, back then webpages were ugly, but they were infinitely easier to build than these days. No CSS, no JavaScript, just plain HTML and nothing else. Anyway, getting off topic. The WWW was not seen as a toy by anyone that I knew of.

https://youtu.be/8tCC9yxUIdw

A wonderful 1 minute snippet of David Bowie explaining how huge of a deal it’s going to be to a skeptical interviewer in the 90s

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