The World Wide Web (1994)
linuxjournal.com
linuxjournal.com
"The burden of the Web on a Linux server was tested by creating a working Web site on a i386-33 Linux machine. During a 40 day span, the PSU Linux WWW received 5375 requests from 1328 different sites around the world. This is an average of 6.9 requests per hour and 165 per day. The Web requests never interfered with any work being done by other users at the machine. A Linux system can easily provide Web services and have horsepower to spare."
It was becoming dominant at that time amidst its siblings like gopher, uucp, archie, netnews, etc but still was pretty new.
Here's a hype video from DEC about the web in early 1994 for example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-1l6aBgX5UY
That browser is NCSA mosaic btw and I presume that's running Tru64. 1994 was still very much the era of educating people, even professionals, about the WWW
:upsidedown-face:
(definitely for sure more-so if you include spacer.gif)
Some old picture book or presentation type GIF files have 0 delay time between frames (doesn't work well with software of later decades, when GIF animations became common), and 0 is “draw as soon as possible” in the specification. Even a simple viewer program without support for metadata or user interaction would have to wait for each frame to be received via modem link, and it would take some time, especially for full screen images. Therefore, a competent GIF viewer software should have an option to simulate 1200 baud download for those old files, and compute the additional delay based on frame size in bytes.
I don't know about those fancy graphical browsers, who has those kinds of resources to just throw at some pretty pictures?
I built Mosaic from source, and I remember scrolling through an article on Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in front of my boss.
When the image of the comet hitting Jupiter scrolled into view, he nearly fell off his chair.
I worked as a consultant connecting businesses to the Internet, and boss asked me if I thought this WWW thing was here to stay, or a fad. I replied, "meh, it's a fad" because I had been underwhelmed by its implementation, compared to some mind-blowing infrastructure systems, GUIs and wonders like the MBONE (talk about fads).
I believe that the tipping point for WWW is when it was realized as a platform for delivering applications (SaaS). Once that angle became apparent, all resources were expended on making that a reality.
As a sibling commenter said, these days most people don't even really refer to the internet often, because it just is, ubiquitous, ever-present, and accessed via apps that abstract it out even more. Being connected is the default state of matters, and does not require a specific term. Just like you don't often need to refer to or think about the air surrounding you.
The Internet is a worldwide computer network and the World Wide Web refers to the worldwide collection of web servers (wherever they may be) hosting HTML-accessible content. And the cloud is just a new term for the World Wide Web that expands the definition to include the worldwide collection of any Internet-accessible service, including web apps.
I think of cloud computing as network-accessible computing resources, often provided by commercial services like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.. (Though private clouds are also a possibility.)
These services typically provide web-based management interfaces and HTTPS-based control APIs, but the computing resources themselves are not tied to the web or HTTP(S). For example I usually interact with cloud computing resources using SSH - a modern equivalent to the remote terminal/remote login protocols that predated the web by decades.
Perhaps you are thinking of CDNs like Cloudflare or Akamai which cache web content for faster access, scalability, and resistance to DDoS?
On the other hand many web browsers supported gopher for another decade at least.
It’s weird to look back and realise that I was among the first 0.1% of people alive today, to start using the web.