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Comment by abdulhaq | Hacker News Reader

The www was a fairly obvious idea that was just waiting for the right technology to power It. It would not have been possible to keep it to yourself and charge for it.

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Are you sure?

This statement reads to me to be heavily hindsight biased.

CERN wasn't exactly a place filled with idiots, yet the article even says that Tim Berners-Lee's boss thought the concept was a little eccentric and only gave in because Tim Berners-Lee fought for it.

Unless you're saying the concept is simple? In which case yes, most brilliant ideas that are hard to have are made by elegantly combining things to make a "simple" result.

The really annoying thing about those ideas is you sit there and kick yourself thinking, "that's so simple, why didn't I think of that"

There's a very different possible future where he instead went private and sold it, and I honestly have no idea how to work out how successful the web would have been in that world.

A good chunk of the web's impact is it was how easy it was to adopt, so I doubt we would have seen as much success as we do see now, as one of the bedrocks of our current ecosystem.

We might even have seen a similar situation to unix and linux, where a theoretical proprietary web that was released eventually was rewritten in an open-source format, but with lots of fragmentation of the ecosystem.

Hypertext systems precede the web, I was using hypertext documents on CompuServe in the late 80s. It's hard to disagree given what was available at the time that putting the hypertext documents on another kind of network was a natural progression.

Surely hypertext and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu were well known to most people in the field by the time Berners-Lee did his work?

If Ted Nelson hadn't been so obsessed with making it pay we might have had the web sooner. Whether that would be a good thing or not is debatable though as the Internet was not available when he started.

The world-wide web wasn't a "fairly obvious" idea at all. It only seems so in hindsight. Private networks are one thing, but a shared space offering a common, open way to host, publish, view and locate content that the entire world can participate it ?

Sure, eventually it could have happened but it may not have happened for several decades.

Hypertext existed. Plan files existed. FTP already existed.

In fact, the only surprising feature of www is that no one bothered to include bidirectional linking, to disastrous consequence.

I'm am no history buff but several decades seems way off. A lot of the pieces were already there: addressing (FTP), hyperlink (hypertext), multi media documents, world wide network, ... IMO his contribution is the overall architecture.

Agreed. I remember back then thinking what the fuss was all about. There already was Gopher and FTP, and connecting these two occurred at least in my mind back then, so it should have been trivial to most people :)

The important thing for it to succeed was to have a large enough group of people using the same standards. That was probably a (very) hard thing to accomplish, and perhaps Berners-Lee played a large role in that?

The WWW sounds like a networked version of Commodore's Amiga Guide from 1989.

And yet at that time we already had a stranglehold of Compuserve and AOL. The talk was of walled gardens, safe spaces compared to the horrific wilds of the open Internet. The web broke down those walls.

This was exactly my thought when reading the article, I understand the cult to Berners-Lee as being one of "the good ones", but I don't subscribe to the idea that, if he had not given it away, the web as we know it would not exist.

I'm sure we can all think of cases where a core technology was kept private and eventually died in favor of an open version, the same would have happened here.

The article says it best "In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free"

Minitel in France, Btx in Germany and undoubtedly other system already had millions of users when the WWW was "invented", and were arguably what it was the next generation of. It was quite the improvement, but yeah, the article sounds too much like "there was nothing, then I came along and now we have the WWW, so listen to me".

Yes, that's exactly what I mean, that "walled gardens" were already thriving, so the idea that CERN could have put out yet another closed platform and would have still won the game is flawed.

I really don't follow. If something like facebook had gotten there first, your argument is that it would eventually not have been walled off? Or that there would be copies of it eventually, free ones? Isn't it more likely that had there not been a free version in the first place, we would ONLY have walled gardens?

The main innovation of the www was HTTP/HTML which brought hypermedia capabilities to content, plus using DNS (which was already known by then) to connect directly to the content host instead of needing middlemen to distribute it (like USENET)

If HTML didn't exist, would we still be in text-only ceefax/minitel style networks? Unlikely.

It was a perfect storm of hardware getting better (most people didn't even have computers capable of displaying VGA images until the early 90s!), networks getting faster and more ubiquitous and there being a gap in the market for a protocol that made us of these advancements.

So my point is if we weren't using the www, it wouldn't have taken long for some other protocol to take its place.

Maybe an apt comparison would be Amiga vs IBM PC compatible, the Amiga had better hardware, more features, etc. But the PC compatibles were open, anyone could build them, replace parts, expand them. PC won. And it wasn't even an open standard to begin with, they were IBM owned until they were reverse engineered into the PC standard we still use today. If CERN had released the www as a closed protocol, maybe we'd be talking about www-compatible today :)

The WWW could be described as a computer version of the BBC's CEEFAX, from 1974. Indeed, CEEFAX eventually made it to the WWW itself.

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