> I feel like more people should watch Dylan Beattle's "The Web that Never Was" presentation.

Didn’t know about it, here is the video of that talk in YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JOD1AQGqEg

There is a poem-style intro titled “Flatscreens / a song about code” until the talk proper starts at 5’11”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JOD1AQGqEg?t=311

Edit: I’m watching it and it is done in an entertaining style but is a bit loose on some details I know about, such as implying that the IBM PC development was started in the early 1970’s when it was in fact started in 1980. Still worth watching so far.

Edit 2: finished, it is definitely worth watching. It goes into “The Twilight Zone” of a very interesting alternative history. And does a good job reporting on the Gary Kildall / IBM missed deal for their PC OS.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t slashes typically reserved for flags on Unix and back slashes on dos/windows? If that’s the case then surely the vertices line, pipe symbol |, would be the most visually appropriate? Piping remote data over a network connection and through the local client program to parse seems to be the kind of thing bike shedding was intended for, in agreement but focusing on semantics. It just seems new by safe and only requires reprogramming the kernel for the shell semantics.

# gemeni:|bike.domain.com|shed

Or even better, everything is little endian to allow autocomplete from previous entries by the user in the shell so that once the user hits the domain keyword the shell history parser assumes the user wants to stay on the site

# gemeni:|shed|bike|domain|com

I’m not sure how feasible this as I’ve never written an internet or shell language

Maybe I'm mis-reading the URI spec [0], but it seems that // is required to separate the scheme from the "authority" part when it's present (as it is for my.domain.com).

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-3.2