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The Web's Timeline

thehistoryoftheweb.com

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> May 18 2021: Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Wasn't the DMCA enacted a lot earlier? Wikipedia says the following[1]:

> The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

yea the webpage is wildly incorrect, wikipedia is right

That's just the date when the article on it was posted to the blog. C'mon.

> [HTML] itself was influenced by similar efforts like SGML, but has since evolved into a lot more.

Time for some pedantry: HTML is/was envisioned as SGML vocabulary, ie. using SGML as markup meta-language to describe the elements, content models, attributes, predefined entities, and other parsing rules for HTML such as tag inferences and attribute shortforms. Or at least TBL tried to.

Also, the basic rich text vocabulary of HTML for paragraphs, spans, headers, etc. is already used in ISO 8879 (SGML) as a commonly used "folklore" markup convention, with only the anchor element (<a>) and a couple others being genuinely new.

And finally, "similar efforts" at the time would be HyTime (also an SGML application) not SGML itself.

Props for listing k10k (which CryptoPunks was heavily inspired from). No mention of E/N (Everything/Nothing) sites, though (markside, john's crawlspace, histandard, badassmofo, chilidog.org, etc, etc)

For the kids: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/kaliber10000-2003

I owe a good deal of my career to the fine folks at Cuban Council. Loved working with all of them.

I love this sort of thing. Whenever I try to make a case for anything at work, I always try to frame it in a historical context because everything we do in computing exists on a historical timeline that's relatively short and ongoing and we shouldn't necessarily hold anything as a universal truth. It's possible that everything we hold dear (OOP, etc) will be a blip in early computing history in the grand scheme of things. I work in web so one thing I preach a lot is that a lot of the explosion of activity in JS over the past decade or so can largely be traced back to the introduction of the iphone, the subsequent mass adoption of mobile devices, and the sudden expectation for native-app like experiences from the web on low powered devices. Thus, a lot of notions about javascript that persist from pre mobile, pre es6, etc need to be checked. "Javascript framework of the week" cynicisms tend to persist from a brief period of "throwing stuff at the wall" to figure out how to leverage AJAX to achieve SPA. Now the language and its ecosystem has matured tremendously and there are other problems to solve so it's important to constantly renew our perceptions and biases. Here's a js timeline I threw together recently https://time.graphics/editor/649085

> To pitch it, he submits a proposal for organizing scientific documents to his employers titled “Information Management, a Proposal.”

If this is going to be the opening item then it would be nice to at least have a blurb about predecessor ideas. Tim Berners-Lee's "Information Management: A Proposal" cites Ted Nelson for the concepts behind "Hypertext" and the "docuverse". Nelson was directly inspired by Vannevar Bush and the idea of the Memex as presented in "As We May Think".

Bush had his own influences, of course, like the Statistical Machine, but it's a huge miss to not go back at least this far considering the US Government's role in building the actual ARPANET/Internet. Bush was director of OSRD / S-1 Executive Committee at the time of "As We May Think", so there's a direct link of influence between the eventual World Wide Web concept and that of the network itself.

https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

https://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Executive_Committee

Somewhat tangentially, for those who are curious, Vannevar Bush was influential beyond his invention of the memex. As head of OSRD, he helped initiate the Manhattan Project and the National Science Foundation. Previously at MIT, he mentored one of his grad students, a guy you might have heard of named Claude Shannon. It's hard to think of a modern equivalent to someone so pivotal.

curious as to why nothing after 2018? are we approaching the end of novelty as established domains act as cartels? It seems that so much new progress is being made in AI/ML.

I wonder what the next "internet" will be. I only started out with Netscape Navigator in 1998. I remember reading HTML for dummies and thinking its so easy to do by hand. Then I discovered geocities and I can drag & drop? Then I stopped paying attention for like a few years until I discovered PHP.

I really miss the aesthetics of late 90s websites

> I really miss the aesthetics of late 90s websites

You should check this out:

https://wiby.me

Here's the first page I got on a roll of the "surprise me" button just now:

http://texaschainsawmassacre.net/Music/

omg!!! i loved it, got a big dose of nostalgia

Maybe 4 years just isn’t long enough for history to form? Hard to recognize pivotal moments as they are happening.

WebAssembly should definitively be on the list.

> I wonder what the next "internet" will be

This is the third Network, so if it helps you to draw a line:

The first Network was what is now called the Universal Postal Union created by the Treaty of Bern. It moves written text in the form of letters, on pieces of paper, in envelopes. The Treaty says OK, how about if everybody can just put their own local stamps on letters, and write any address in the world, we all agree to move the letters to the address and we can pay for that work with the local stamps we sold, it's simpler and on average it works out fine.

Before this, to send a letter from say, Nottingham to Leipzig, you must wrap each letter in another letter explaining to an intermediary how to get it to its destination, or to the next intermediary (e.g. Portsmouth, Le Havre, Strasbourg), each with suitable stamps for the local postal system. This is both time-consuming, expensive and fragile.

The second Network was the Public Switched Telephone Network. This was formed by connecting local telephone networks around the globe together, and using switches (eventually digital switches) so that circuits could be created by the end user rather than needing a human operator who worked for the phone company to make the circuit connecting your call. With the PSTN you could (for a fee) talk to people on distant parts of the planet almost instantly.

The third Network improves on the second by being designed for moving arbitrary data (bits) rather than voices and more importantly by being packet oriented rather than circuit switched.

If you see something claiming to be the "next Internet" and it isn't at least as radical an improvement as IP was over the PSTN, then it's lying to you.

My guess is if a fourth Network happens, it would move physical material of some sort, like the first Network did, but digitally - which is currently impossible but is perhaps a technology that could some day be invented. Such a technology would be able to obsolete some of the things we can't use this Network for today.

never thought of it like this. The Treat of Bern is super interesting, thought you were referring to Tim Berners-Lee.

There is a 2.5 network I think....Minitel in France for example or Nintendo Famicom Network

Your fourth generation Network is quite interesting. I think its impossible to move physical items over the wire even in the future, instead something that approaches 4th generation via progressive improvements with other areas of sensory feedbacks: tactile, olfactory that could be stored and transmitted over the wire.

Like I imagine a situation where you could order a basketball on Amazon and it instantly appears but it feels, smells, tastes (lol) exactly like a real thing, but it works only in certain zones where it can be conjured up digitally. Perhaps some advancement in ultrasound where objects can be created, and is able to detect collision with your body, and simulate tactile/olfactory feedbacks

1994 was a wild time. I'm pretty sure that's when I first connected to the internet and got my first e-mail address (at cello.gina.calstate.edu!). Using Mosaic and soon Netscape Navigator for the first time was nothing short of mind-blowing. By 1996, I was publishing my own websites, and then in 1997 someone paid me to build them a website. 25 years later, I'm still getting paid to build websites. What a ride!

Had no clue IMDb was that old

The Web from 1989 to 1994 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27928020 - July 2021 (22 comments)

Raise your hand if you're one of the ding-dongs who in 1991 thought the internet was only ever going to be good for song lyrics and porn.

/raises hand in shame/

(Note: i'm excluding things like EaasySabre [sic])

Well if you want to get academic about it: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-...

I was a dedicated archie and gopher user, thought web was going to be just for grandmas. EaasySabre was awesome, though, I switched from Delphi to CompuServe around then.

Also really liked PointCast, that was a lifesaver when our whole company shared a dial-up modem connection.

I still consider Word Magazine an early high point of online culture, nothing quite replaced it for me.

Where is the Apache (httpd) server?

wish this had some more prehistory e.g. BBS, gopher etc.

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