'The Single Most Valuable Document In The History Of The World Wide Web' | Hacker News Reader

'The Single Most Valuable Document In The History Of The World Wide Web'

npr.org

150 pointsjacobjulius36 comments

>What if the Web had been patented?

Then it would have ended up like Gopher[1]. In 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would start to charge license fees to use its implementation of the Gopher server. By 2000, when the university GPLed it, it was too late.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29

Original Web browsers were capable of using Gopher in a graphical way; in fact, being cross-protocol like that was a big deal in the early days, back when a lot of Universities had substantial amounts of information on Gopher servers and indexed by search software like Veronica and Jughead. (Easy access to FTP was a big deal, too, but FTP hasn't disappeared to the extent Gopher has, so it kind of still is.)

http://www.netlingo.com/more/gopher.php

server != protocol

It does when you are trying to get traction, especially if you have competition in both the protocol and implementation spaces.

> Then it would have ended up like Gopher

That's a decent guess, but I think it's also possible it would've followed the path of one of the pre-web online services like AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, or eWorld. Those systems are what happens when somebody owns the marketplace and you need to get permission to set up shop, which (if the WWW took off at all) would more or less have been the state of things while the patents lasted.

Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like the realm of the app store in some ways.

Funny. I think I just realized that Facebook has become AOL – keywords and all.

I remember when movie trailers had AOL keywords in them. Now it's "Like Action Drivel on Facebook!"

Good thing the web wasn't invented in Silicon Valley.

EDIT: Wanted to add that I'm not really a Silicon Valley hater. Silicon Valley did a lot to make the web what it is today, starting with companies like Netscape and Sun and followed by all the dot com and Web 2.0 powerhouses.

word to that! :)

I thought I was the only person around here who thought The Valley was overrated. I think its center-of-innovation days are behind it. Today it's more where things are marketed than where they are invented, and the major activity seems to be trying to get people to click ads.

I laugh sometimes at the popularity of things like transhumanism around the Valley. I hear a lot of talk like that, but see little action. Trying to get people to click ads is not going to enhance longevity or intelligence. Most of that work is going on elsewhere, such as at major medical institutes and universities.

Our family has been in SV since the 70's, and having grown up here and having heard stories and met people who lived through the decades here, I've sadly come to think that we were doing a better service to the world at large in the 80's than we are today.

On the good side, one reason I think the Valley is overrated today is that what the Valley was has gone airborne. I see more innovation in more places.

> Today it's more where things are marketed than where they are invented, and the major activity seems to be trying to get people to click ads.

It's where the money is. More deals get done on Sand Hill Road than anywhere else. But, it was never where things got invented. The transistor was invented in New Jersey and Shockley set up shop in silicon valley because land was so cheap.

Regarding your 2nd paragraph: That sounds true. What we need are science & engineering startups and AI/ML/robotics and some formal methods and crypto applied to those fields. Are you interested?

The basic concept of hyperlinking had an origin at least as far back as 1960 by Ted Nelson for Project Xanadu. So, I would imagine whatever new aspect got the patent would have been routed around. We did have HyperCard at the time, so that might have served as a basis (as in idea, not code).

Computer Lib / Dream Machines was an interesting book, the University of North Dakota library had a copy while I was in college (late-80's).

> The basic concept of hyperlinking had an origin at least as far back as 1960 by Ted Nelson for Project Xanadu.

This reminds me of a quote from Tim Berners-Lee:

“Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together.”

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/ber1int-1

Actually Ted Nelson claims that hyperlinking comes from the 1945 essay http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... which also contains the inspiration that leads to the scientific citation index. (Amusingly Google's PageRank is what you get when you apply the scientific citation index part of that essay to the most popular implementation of the hyperlink part of that essay.)

Now one may wonder how Vannevar Bush was able to have such great insight into how to make computing useful for people when computers were in their infancy. (For instance Von Neumann's description of the Von Neumann computer architecture came out only weeks before.) The explanation is simple - Vannevar Bush had pretty good ideas about how to make this stuff work because he'd been building/configuring/etc computers for almost 20 years at that point. And in his work he'd encountered all sorts of machines that handled information, including machines used for tabulating the census, and he'd been thinking about the memex for about a decade.

We live in a field that likes to forget its history. There is a lot more of it - extending back farther - than we realize.

> So, I would imagine whatever new aspect got the patent would have been routed around.

Probably so, but I suspect the hinderances to innovation and productivity would have been massive.

Yeah, because prior art has kept so many other crap patents from being granted, or subsequently helped invalidate them when the patent holder sued for infringement...

UK Company BT had a patent for hyperlinks. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/798475.stm)

> BT says a patent filed in the US in 1976 and granted in 1989 gives it ownership of hyperlink technology

Luckily they lost that case.

Ted Nelson told me himself that he was going to patent hypertext in about 1971, but his then wife argued him out of it.

I remember software development in the early 90s. Every rinky-dink software development library was very expensive and some even required royalty payments per license sold. Libraries that came with development environments were insignificant. Everyone wanted to charge for everything. Free software was a novelty that nobody could understand because, after all, how where the authors making money on it?

They weren't all expensive, many were very affordable for commercial developers. But you had to pay the money up front without very little idea about the suitability or quality. Then if you went with the library, you had to live with the author's own personal ideas about what your business relationship should be.

Remembering this is almost like a ward against cynicism. My world is much better because someone did the right thing.

I'm printing that document, and hanging it on my wall.

If the web was patented, just maybe someone would have come up with a stateful, non-markup solution (or at a least better markup solution) to supplant it :)

perhaps like a networked HyperCard with downloadable stacks?

This is one of those rare instances where a statement like 'The Single Most Valuable Document In The History Of The World Wide Web' is not hyperbole.

I think it's at least a little hyperbolic. Even the article says explicitly "There might be a bit of hyperbole in that statement."

You'd have to think that something like google.com is the most valuable page.

Thanks to this, they will go down in history as the inventors of one of the most important technologies in human history.

If the Internet were patented, I have no doubt that someone would have spawned their own version of it (perhaps with a few differences to prevent a lawsuit) and CERN's version would have failed much like Gopher did. The Internet is a perfect example of an instance where a patent would have stifled innovation not spurned it.

The Web.

The web, in one form or another would have happened regardless. Intellect is limited by the speed of networking brains.

Hard to imagine it was 'only' 20 years ago. Can you imagine what will come 20 years from today, in 2033?

And here we are trying to replace the web with apps.

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