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Comment by ojbyrne | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I agree, entirely, that the invention of the web was the key thing. I think really the invention of the internet (TCP/IP, DNS, routers, running cables) were the big thing. And it inevitably led to apps running on it, which became gradually more sophisticated. Email, Usenet, Veronica, Gopher, and eventually, the browser and HTML.

In a sense what you're suggesting is somewhat analogous to saying Microsoft Word was more important than the PC. Though I guess you could argue that Microsoft Windows was at least as important as the PC.

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I agree about the importance of, e.g., TCP/IP. But we're headed for James Burke territory now. It's ultimately kind of pointless to argue which inventions in a chain were more important than others: What are the criteria? Who is more important, Einstein or Einstein's mother? Where would Einstein have been without his mother?

And inventions tend to come along when their time is right. Lots of important things are invented simultaneously. That makes it hard to argue that, say, the inventors of Gopher were significantly less brilliant than Tim Berners-Lee, or that OS/2 was less significant than Windows 3.1 from any perspective other than hindsight.

All of which ties into what I think is my greater point: Don't be too hard on yourself about the apparent pointlessness of your work. A lot of pointless things turn out to be worthwhile, and a lot of apparently important things turn out to be pointless.

Thanks for the reference to Burke and "Connections".

I'm not sure whether you are using Burke as an example of over- or under-weighting factors in history. I believe the latter, but can see either argument.

No matter. "Connections" was worthwhile viewing.

Here is the way I (not the GP) would make the case: at the time HTML was invented, we had e-mail, chat, bulletin boards, ftp sites, and news groups. You could download pictures and movies and music (although the bandwidth and processing demands were prohibitive, especially for movies). What we didn't have was any way to visualize this: oh look, someone said that, referring to this, which is visualized by a thumbnail, which takes me to this other thing when I click it. Once this happened, the value proposition finally became obvious to a large swath of the population.

I agree with what you say, but here's a crisper statement: that the web was the first internet service to exploit the usability gains of the graphical user interface.

(There were graphical Usenet clients, but most people used text-mode clients. Even if graphical email clients like Outlook were used by more people than text-mode ones, they weren't significantly better because email wasn't designed to make use of them.)

He did say in the past 20 years. Everything you're talking about occurred outside of that time frame.

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