What Might Have Been
My group had a chance to talk to the head of CERN yesterday. Mostly his talk and our discussion focused on the Large Hadron Collider and also some organization aspects of CERN. He did, however, mention that the work that led to the development of the World Wide Web was done at CERN. He also said that when CERN realized this Web concept was promising, they tried to put it up for sale. But nobody was interested. And since nobody was interested, they released their work to the public for free and one thing led to another and now we have the Web we all know and love.
Internet history isn’t something I’m all that familiar with, despite my familiarity with all internet traditions, but it’s fascinating to think about what might have happened had some firm decided to buy in. Maybe the open internet we have today wouldn’t have existed?
115 Responses to “What Might Have Been”
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November 14th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Man, that’s too terrifying to contemplate. Stop talking about that scary-ass shit.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Maybe the open internet we have today wouldn’t have existed?
Or, maybe the web would have grown faster, with the resources of giant corporations behind it earlier in the game, instead of just a handful of academics working on it part-time.
Anyway, Al Gore invented the internet. Everyone knows that.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Apropos of nothing, I’m a little perplexed as to why, 7 months after leaving The Atlantic, matthewyglesias.com still points to your old site. Can you update the entry?
November 14th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Of course, the Internet and the Web are distinct, in that CERN only invented the Web. Which made the Internet a lot more use-friendly.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Arguably, CERN didn’t even “invent” the WWW. They did come up with the http protocol (yes, that’s redundant — ATM Machine — so there!), but there were several similar protocols in the works or even already available (e.g., gopher); and the graphic browser came out of Univ. of IL Champaigne-Urbana.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
From wikipedia:
Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted that, “as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication.”
November 14th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Or, maybe the web would have grown faster, with the resources of giant corporations behind it earlier in the game, instead of just a handful of academics working on it part-time.
What, like the walled gardens of Compuserve, Prodigy or AOL?
The internet that everyone knows, loves and uses is based on sets of protocols that were made open by, basically, computer geeks who gave software away because (a) that was how it was done, and (b) giving stuff away insured that other people would use it, hence cross-compatibility. We owe the open internet to people who wrote things like the BSD TCP/IP stack, Sendmail, DNS, and Mosaic, and gave them away. Very few of these people got rich. My impression is that most of them are pretty happy with how it turned out though.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Mixner seems perpetually enraged.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
pseudonymous in nc seems to be perpetually on the verge of bursting a blood vessel.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
IBM and Sears spent $1B funding Prodigy (the first mass market online service that aspired to become a proprietary internet). AOL, which was independent, did better, in part because they could follow looser accounting rules and more openly accommodate the pornographic aspects of chatrooms and IM. AT&T’s idea of on-line services was to charge $0.10 per minute for 2400 baud connectivity. So much for the “vision” and “resources” of the big guys.
Much of the technology behind the internet existed well before the internet took off. What was the real spur was government regulation, that encouraged the “inter-connection” of various networks and protected the new “information providers” from the phone companies.
So in a very real sense it was Al Gore, through his Senate Committees who really did “create” the internet as we know it.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
*UGH* This is just an example of people not understanding the difference between “The internet” and “The World Wide Web”. The free and open internet already existed when Tim Berners Lee invented HTML and HTTP (the two technologies that drive the world wide web). That’s what made it possible in the first place.
If CERN had sold HTML/HTTP we’d all have used Gopher and Fetch for a while, but someone would have come up with something else that was similar and we’d all be using that.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
The best “what-if” comparisons we have are probably AOL and Compuserve.
There are many subtleties in the design of the WWW and in TCP/IP itself that are crucial for the success of “The Internet”, which as a mass phenomenon is arguably WWW + email + I.M.
Example #1: the presence of a “view source” command in browsers really fostered uptake of the WWW.
Example #2:the exponential backoff algorithm baked into (most? all?) TCP/IP implementations meant that as the number of personal computers coming on to the Internet exploded, there was a sort of built-in “culture of politeness”: when demand saturated a network resource, instead of yelling “LET ME IN” and saturating it even worse, the PCs in effect murmured quietly to themselves “hhmm; he’s busy, I’ll come back later and knock more softly then.”
You might enjoy Berners-Lee’s book; he comes across as a tremendously decent fellow. I really liked the technical parts but then I write software for a living.
Lessig’s “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” is a book-length exploration of how technical choices express and constrain social and legal environments: http://codev2.cc/
November 14th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
What, like the walled gardens of Compuserve, Prodigy or AOL?
No, like the personal computing lifeblood of Microsoft, Apple and Google.
The internet that everyone knows, loves and uses is based on sets of protocols that were made open by, basically, computer geeks who gave software away because (a) that was how it was done, and (b) giving stuff away insured that other people would use it, hence cross-compatibility.
No, the success of those protocols is a combination of historical contingency and technical merit. Giving stuff away doesn’t ensure that other people will use it.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Chad is right — Invention in today’s environment is not about coming up with a truly unique idea. There is a complex interaction between marketing, economics and (especially in the realm of communcations) government regulation. An niche that can be successfully filled (from a business perspective) can usually be satisfied by many different technologies that can come from a variety of sources. If CERN didnt provide a browser, someone else surely would have.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I’ve previously suggested that hanging was too good for Tim BernersLee. To understand why I’d say that, look into Taligent, OpenDoc, and the like. Instead of using ideas like that, TBL and friends used an extremely simplistic approach that has ended up creating a huge industry designed to work around original design limitations. Companies have literally spent billions of dollars trying to convert TBL/et al’s childlike design into something more like a standard desktop application. A better design would have completely avoided that, and who knows where we’d be now?
And, raising the issue of slow connections and the like isn’t going to work; if the original design had been good, it could have been added on to as technology improved.
To give an example, how can you find out MattY’s email address? You have to visit this page and look around. On many sites that isn’t there. Under a more advanced scheme, a website would be a thing called an object, with a standard interface that anyone could use. A program could “ask” that object for the email address of the owner and receive it, no visiting the page required. (Of course, that’s a highly simplified example, and access controls to various bits of information would have been provided, etc.)
November 14th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I suggest you have a look here.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
If CERN didnt provide a browser, someone else surely would have.
Well, plenty of people did provide browsers in the 90s (anyone remember Cello?). The inventor of Tcl called writing a web browser the “hello world” of internet applications.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
24AheadDotCom is right. These guys are total losers! If only they contributed as much to humanity as he does!
November 14th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
So in a very real sense it was Al Gore, through his Senate Committees who really did “create” the internet as we know it.
The internet originated in military projects funded by the Defense Department as part of the Cold War.
So, in a very real sense, it was the Soviet Union, through its influence on U.S. government spending, that really did “create” the internet as we know it.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
What’s interesting to me is the inability to sell it. I’ve personally given away some pretty cool stuff because I couldn’t sell it. And now everyone in the industry uses that stuff I couldn’t sell. Sucks for me, right? Well, not really. It was a learning experience and I don’t program anymore (and now I can’t). I’ve found industries where my talents are better rewarded. But we always ask about what could have been, don’t we? Oh well, we can just succeed. And life goes on….
November 14th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
So, this Mixner guy is seriously mixed up. What’s the expression, when you’re in a hole, stop digging…
M$ – fought the Internet as hard as they could, then decided to (and pretty much succeeded) in undermining Netscape, the first real pure Internet company.
Apple, didn’t fight it like M$, but were pretty much irrelevant until the commercial Web got going, and I will give them credit for figuring it out pretty well with iTunes.
Google, definitely an internet success story, but remember that one of their lucky stars was that they start up as the Internet bubble was bursting, thus allowing them to get a lot of the best talent as they were looking for work after their companies had gone bust.
OK, you are right that it doesn’t guarantee that people will use something that you give away, but the Internet and the entire Open Source movement show that this can be an extremely strong foundation for technology upon which businesses can be built and run.
What is your point, other than showing your ignorance?
November 14th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Mixner, your comment is silly:
“maybe the web would have grown faster, with the resources of giant corporations behind it earlier in the game, instead of just a handful of academics working on it part-time.”
Then, we’d have an internet which most of us would not be able to use because we’d be paying by the byte.
Why don’t you just admit it: there are certain things, like the military, interstate highways, national land management and the internet which are better off owned publicly by us all.
Sort of like the way the people of Alaska all have a stake in the oil under their ground.
Oh, one other thing: health care.
Now go get your shine box.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
It’s really very simple. The reason HTTP and HTML were successful technologies is the same reason that CERN couldn’t sell them to anybody. They were designed from the ground up to be open standards with lots of interoperable implementations. None of the competing technologies at the time were sufficiently open and interoperable to be a technical success, despite what 23AheadDotCom would have you believe, and the barrier to entry in the marketplace with a new proprietary system was prohibitive.
If it hadn’t been WWW, then it would have been something else. Here’s a horrifying thought: it might have looked a lot like Texinfo and/or Usenet.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
So, this Mixner guy is seriously mixed up.
So, this Jim guy is an idiot.
M$ fought the Internet as hard as they could, then decided to (and pretty much succeeded) in undermining Netscape, the first real pure Internet company.
Microsoft was instrumental in spreading the hardware and software that allowed the internet to become a mass phenomenon, and the vast majority of internet users today access it using Microsoft products.
Google, definitely an internet success story, but remember that one of their lucky stars was that they start up as the Internet bubble was bursting, thus allowing them to get a lot of the best talent as they were looking for work after their companies had gone bust.
The point is that Google, like Apple and Microsoft, is a commercial, profit-driven corporation, and has played a huge role in the growth of the web.
OK, you are right that it doesn’t guarantee that people will use something that you give away, but the Internet and the entire Open Source movement show that this can be an extremely strong foundation for technology upon which businesses can be built and run.
No one has suggested otherwise. I was responding to Matt’s suggestion that earlier commercial involvement might have stifled the internet’s growth and vitality.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
The fellow who was Tim Berners-Lee’s boss at CERN told an amusing story on himself. It seems that Berners-Lee came into his office one day all excited and started describing the web pretty much as we know it. His boss listened for awhile, and then started thinking – “this is so boring, how can I get this guy to leave?”
November 14th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Mixner, are you seriously arguing that we would be better off with a privately owned, proprietary web? Or perhaps multiple webs, all blocked off from each other?
Exactly how successful would google/ebay/amazon/etc be in a system that is closed like that?
Having the basic infrastructure/basis/whatnot of the web be owned by only a small number of huge corporations would serve to stifle innovation and erect huge barriers to market entry by the little guys. You know the little guys. The ones who create the innovative things? Like google? Or facebook? Or myspace? Or napster? But yeah, hotmail is AWESOME!
November 14th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Mixner is now just lashing out at the many people who are sick to death of him. Sad, friendless virginity must be mentally draining on the poor thing, because he’s now playing idiot contrarian in areas where his lack of knowledge is exposed even more quickly than usual.
Anyway, Berners-Lee’s story is fun: the original project started out as a lowest-common denominator way to connect the different databases and document repositories across CERN. He came back to it when things had evolved a little — not gopher (1991) but rather WAIS (Brewster Kahle) and Archie for wide-area search.
I can remember a time in early 1994, after a few weeks of using Mosaic, when it felt as if I’d visited every site on the web. You still had to rely upon gopher and sometimes Archie/Veronica stuff over telnet, but what made the browser useful was that it coped gracefully with non-HTTP protocols, particularly gopher and FTP. Then came Netscape in late 1994, and the rest is history.
(The exchange on the WWW-talk list between Marc Andreessen and the SGML purists about his proposed IMG tag is pretty amusing for the historical record. We know who won that one. It also belies Kelly the Blogwhore: he can go and talk to Ted Nelson about how designing ‘a more advanced scheme’ works in practice. For HTTP, as with TCP/IP, ‘just smart enough not to break’ has a pretty good track record.)
November 14th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
So in a very real sense it was Al Gore, through his Senate Committees who really did “create” the internet as we know it.
The internet originated in military projects funded by the Defense Department as part of the Cold War.
So, in a very real sense, it was the Soviet Union, through its influence on U.S. government spending, that really did “create” the internet as we know it.
Also worth noting pedantically, Somersby-style, that in a very real sense Gore never claimed to have invented the internet.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Of course not, he’s just trolling to try to get a rise out of you.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Mixner, are you seriously arguing that we would be better off with a privately owned, proprietary web?
I’m saying I don’t think anyone knows. But the question is pretty vague (”better off” by what measure?) and I’m not sure what “privately owned, proprietary web” is supposed to mean, anyway. The web already involves lots of proprietary standards, and mostly proprietary, commercial, privately owned software and hardware. The “open” part of it is mainly just HTML and certain derivatives, and some low-level data transmission protocols.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
The point is that Google, like Apple and Microsoft, is a commercial, profit-driven corporation
Cute thing: google.stanford.edu still works. (akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo is gone, alas, even from archive.org.) Strangely, in the late 90s, the VC-fueled search/portal market couldn’t provide what two guys in the Stanford University CS department came up with. That was, in part, because they were busy trying to sell top search rankings.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Mixner is now just lashing out at the many people who are sick to death of him.
That would be the many multiple personalities rattling around inside bubbleandsqueak in nc’s diseased brain.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
There was a very entertaining series on PBS a few years ago called “Triumph of the Nerds”, that ran thorugh a history of the PC, Mac, birth of the internet, etc.
According to (my memeory of) one segment, Xerox commissioned a group of researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC-Xerox) in the early to mid ’70s to investigate the idea of the “paperless office”. PARC-Xerox researchers then developed 1) laser printers, 2) Ethernet (to network their PCs/workstations), and 3) the mouse/pointer driven Graphic User Interface.
When it was all presented to Xerox management, the Xerox people couldn’t grasp what they had, and let the developments go. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, while visiting PARC-Xerox, immediately recognized the importance of the GUI interface that he immediately went back to a very young Apple and started them implementing it for the first-generation Mac (?). (Jobs also admitted that GUI blew his mind such that the importance of the other two developments completely evaded him.)
So, LOTS of things might today be “owned” by Xerox, if they had had the foresight to see what they owned at that time.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I am not a personality rattling around in somebody else’s brain, and yes, I am sick of Mixner. He’s motivated by hatred for humanity and a pathetic need for attention.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
As noted above the world-wide web is a recent addition to the very-well older well established (esp. in academic circles) and very anarchic internet.
I know how much you like your counterfactuals so I am sorry to be such a party-pooper. There was a race on to establish a internet hyper-liked standard browser in the early nineties. Mosaic/www won out. If they had sold it so somone it would have died and the next person to to have come up with a decent graphics based browser would have won out. The great thing about the WWW is that it successfully combined the internet with a graphical interface–it’s that last technical 1% that led to the explosion.
As we can see with almost anything that succeeds on the internet it must be freely available. It’s a gating factor. End of story.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
To see what the Web might have been, look at the fiasco that is the cell phone industry in the US today.
Corporate decision-making is brain dead. Just look at IBM giving development and ownership of the PC operating system to Microsoft. After all, who cared about the software?
24HeadDotCom, Netscape (Andresen) had ideas about upgrading the Web, with IIOP built into the first Mozilla browser. However the current move to SOA, Web Services and REST is in part an acknowledgment that that approach won’t scale over the Internet. XML is replacing HTML for content. The Web has made impressive progress, given the huge installed base that it has to be compatible with. New ideas have helped the Web develop beyond the competing ideas that were kicking around in the 90s.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Having the basic infrastructure/basis/whatnot of the web be owned by only a small number of huge corporations would serve to stifle innovation and erect huge barriers to market entry by the little guys.
You mean like how the proprietary architecture of the IBM PC erected huge barriers to market entry by the little guys, so that the hundreds of thousands of small, independent companies that make hardware and software products for PCs don’t really exist but are just figments of our imagination?
November 14th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Robert Earle writes:
Or not.
The Wikipedia entry for Jeff Raskin states:
November 14th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
I think private ownership would be teh EPIC win. It would be like the situation we face now when we want to talk about tv shows we watched but aren’t sure if the guy you’re talking to’s cable provider carries that station. Only multiplied by a billion (or maybe a google).
‘Hey you want to get into my fantasy football league?’
‘Sure’
‘Do you get Yahoo?’
‘No, I’m on compuserve, we have a proprietary fantasy league, it uses CFL players but we only pay $40 extra a month to get the fantasy package. With it I get limited access to ESPN.com and SI.com too because they’re premiums sites and have their own teir.’
‘Uhhhh OK.’
November 14th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
whereas closed operating systems (i.e., Microsoft) rule.
Well, that depends on the space you’re working in. Front-end? Yeah, and there are lots of long, historical explanations of why that is. Behind the scenes, when you’re dealing with people who wear logo t-shirts instead of suits, it’s a substantially different story.
One fun factoid: Berners-Lee’s original browser was written for the NeXTSTEP platform, i.e. what Jobs worked on between his stints at Apple. NeXT never succeeded commercially, but it significantly influenced the direction of computing for the next decade, and was the platform for a boatload of important development work.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
For those thinking that Microsoft would have been a magic pixie dust dispenser for the nascent internet, I give you Microsoft Blackbird from the deep recess of 1995!
“Microsoft: a way to mainstream OLE”
…
“Microsoft’s challenge is to make MSN flourish soon, so that it won’t be eclipsed by more open systems, making Blackbird irrelevant, or at least obsolescent. The situation is similar to AT&T’s with Interchange, which is also a proprietary network with more layout flexibility than the Web offers today. AT&T and Microsoft must deliver great development tools in order to maintain their advantage.”
It was Dead On Arrival.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
It would’ve likely been about as lame as 1994-vintage America Online, back when they were trying and failing to make the Internet their own little proprietary fiefdom. They would’ve been both the medium and the content, and totally sucked at both.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
There are several issues involved here, but the point I was getting at is that the web was designed, AFAIK, as simply a way to send text files which were then hacked into some sort of page-like UI. The better way to do things would be OO, where a site is an object consisting of other objects: a directory of those associated with that site referencing user objects, and so on. That way, for instance, I could write a program to get all of the people associated with ThinkProgress and let them know what I thought of them.
Now, how that was developed and promulgated is a different issue: it could have been a closed effort through MS, or it could be open source. That’s a different argument.
And, how it was implemented is also a different issue. What I describe could have been implemented even using plain text files if necessary.
The point is that there was no conceptualization involving OO but instead it was just a hack, and that hack has cost billions and billions in busywork.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
24AheadDotCom said:
This is excessively nasty to Tim Berners-Lee. You may be quite right that other technologies such as Taligent, OpenDoc, and the like, whereas his was simplistic and childlike, etc. Then the smart thing for the rest of the industry would have been to use those other superior technologies, and not use his. But that’s not what happened.
NCSA developed the Mosaic browser, its user base took off, and the rest was history. HTTP/HTML have now swamped the entire world; meanwhile, a few bored readers of Matt Yglesias’ blog are over at Wikipedia trying to find out what the hell Taligent and OpenDoc were.
I remember laments like this back in the mid-90’s, enraged designers ranting about what an awful thing this newfangled HTML atrocity was, gnashing their teeth while the whole world was going insane all around them. And yet, none of the technologies they advocated caught on even remotely as well as the Web did.
It’s happened many times before, and it’s been a trite story ever since Betamax was overcome by VHS. For whatever reasons, a technology perceived as inferior sweeps away rivals thought to be better, to the great frustration of the experts, who nevertheless can’t stop it. Whole libraries of books have been written about why that happens; but Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t have to apologize for any of it, nor should he be threatened with a hanging. He couldn’t have known how things would turn out, and if he did, he might have done some things differently. But it’s not his fault that his ideas were successful, even if they were more successful than they deserved to be. If the industry has wasted billions, then they only have themselves to blame for their choices.
November 14th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
The point is that there was no conceptualization involving OO
Hello Mr Sledgehammer, meet Mr Nut.
Following what Buckeye Hamburger says, the ‘make it more SGMLish’ brigade was there from the start, but getting something like DocBook (in its original SGML incarnation) to work well outside closed environments would have dragged on and on.
Anyway, once you start talking about OO, you start arguing about taxonomy, and arguing taxonomy is a great way to ensure that you never get wide-ranging uptake. That is, if you ever get your shit out of the door. (In that regard, Jon Postrel was right.) HTML was dumb enough for people to do their own markup without dealing with DTDs, and browsers had ‘View Source’.
November 14th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
The interest question to me is why open Internet protocols basically rule whereas closed operating systems (i.e., Microsoft) rule.
But open internet protocols are just the building blocks. Almost all web software is commercial and proprietary. And so is almost all the hardware. The proper analogy is not to an operating system but to an “open standards” programming language like C. No one “owns” C (although companies may own propietary derivatives). It’s an “open” standard used by computer software and hardware companies to sell commercial products.
November 14th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Reading through the comments, it didn’t take me long to find Mixner’s first comment (#2). Man, that was just too true to form.
In other analysis, the Cato Institute finds that the Interstate system of highways would have been completed 50 years earlier if the Standard Oil Company trust hadn’t been broken up.
November 14th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Almost all web software is commercial and proprietary.
Define ‘web software’, Mixie No-Friends. Specifically. Web server software? Database software? Publishing frameworks? Language interpreters? Backend code? Oh, and define ‘all’, too. Do 91 million sites running Apache count as just one instance of a piece of ‘web software’? Do all Wordpress-powered blogs?
(Oh look, this site is running off Apache on Debian. And the blog itself uses Wordpress.)
November 14th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
The head of CERN is wrong. Rolf-Dieter Heuer was not involved in the development of the Web in any form as far as I am aware. I was a member of the Web team, he was not.
The politics of the Web at CERN were pretty convoluted but the code went into the public domain a long time before we let them know how important it was. I am not going to tell the whole story at this point but suffice to say that we had hidden depth.
At the time computer networks were very visible in the intel community. They were on our side for reasons of their own. We were at one point running a server inside Sarajevo during the siege.
The Web code was made public domain at Tim’s insistence in 1992 when there were 100 users. He had observed that the growth of Gopher was totally killed when the university attempted to make money off it. In fact that is the reason we had a CERN server and an NCSA server. The NCSA server was coded when the outcome of the CERN copyright issue was in doubt. That server eventually became a ‘patchy server’ – Apache.
If the CERN code had not been released in the public domain we would have had to release the second code base I put together in Germany. The protocols were never at risk of being patented.
Oh and we all got pushed out of CERN for our pains, but that is missed out of the public history.
November 14th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
the Cato Institute finds that the Interstate system of highways would have been completed 50 years earlier if the Standard Oil Company trust hadn’t been broken up.
Yes, that’s right, c. A guy who works for CERN inventing a document markup language is like the U.S. government building the interstate highway system.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Mixie No-Friends.
pseudonymous escaped lunatic.
Define ‘web software’,
Software used for the web.
Specifically. Web server software? Database software? Publishing frameworks? Language interpreters? Backend code?
Yes, all of those types of software would be included, as would many others.
Oh, and define ‘all’, too.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/all
Do 91 million sites running Apache count as just one instance of a piece of ‘web software’?
A “site” doesn’t “run” Apache. Apache is web server software. You really ought to learn something about the internet, pseudo.
Do all Wordpress-powered blogs?
No, I don’t think most blogs properly count as software at all, regardless of which blogging software powers them.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
the U.S. government building the interstate highway system.
President Eisenhower was a socialist.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
That’s a really nasty troll you got there. Does it live here all the time?
November 14th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Oh look, pseudonymous just created yet another personality. How many is that now? 114?
November 14th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Wait! it was Gore, no CERN, no DARPA, no, etc. etc.
network connectivity was a general trend, there were various protocols and attempts any of a number could have worked fine or even better. The only thing that was needed was standardization.
No could invent the internet, becasue it is just the inter connection. Any of many protocls could do just fine. Pick one was the game.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
To give an example, how can you find out MattY’s email address? You have to visit this page and look around. On many sites that isn’t there. Under a more advanced scheme, a website would be a thing called an object, with a standard interface that anyone could use. A program could “ask” that object for the email address of the owner and receive it, no visiting the page required. (Of course, that’s a highly simplified example, and access controls to various bits of information would have been provided, etc.)
I’m pretty sure that 100% of the reason that HTTP succeeded is that if I want to know what Matt Yglesias’ email address, I can go to his website and see where he has it listed, without ever having to navigate some nested-menu hellscape of an interface in order to convince my not-http internet webprogram that I would please, please dearly love if it would be so kind as to ask Matt’s website what his fucking email address is.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Once more unto the blogosphere, my friends, once more.
The troll is completely wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And so are most of the open source folk.
At the time open source meant Richard Stallman and GNU. Now if you agree with RMS that can only mean that either you are RMS or have not met RMS or spoken with him or taken him seriously. Everything Bill Gates says of RMS is actually true. RMS started FSF because he is an extreme utopian visionary who at root does not believe in money. His intent with the GNU copyleft was precisely to poison the well of proprietary software, he told me that himself, in person.
What we were trying to do was just to change the world, not engage in RMS’s personal rage against the machine. We were deep into the political philosophy of Ithiel de Sola Pool and understood what we were up to: disintermediation of the establishment media, a ten year program. OK so it took us twenty, so sue us.
So while I was at CERN I spent some of my time personally lobbying IBM and Microsoft and anyone else we could think of to push the idea of the Web and to get them to adopt our protocols and ideas.
The Web code was deliberately put in the public domain and not under an open source license for that exact reason. We did not want anything in return, certainly not control of the code.
Now if we did it all over again the better plan would have been to publish under BSD so that we kept the credit. But there were reasons at the time that some of us were keeping a low profile and probably not so good for the project if people really knew who was behind it all or why.
But no, we specifically rejected the GPL because we wanted Microsoft and IBM to use our code – as they did in Windows and Warp.
The Web would not have happened faster under proprietary code because we were busy promoting proprietary and open source code bases at the same time. Cato and your troll are wrong.
Of course nobody knows this stuff because nobody others to ask. Well folk ask Tim but he is not the type to tell the really interesting stuff, and in any case there was a lot that he would never know and a lot he was not interested in. Tim is not a political animal, but some of us were.
Still, its fun watching folk rediscovering it all.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Oh and I should also mention that at the time most ‘free’ software did not actually work. Finding code that would compile was a novelty.
One of the big changes that came in with the Web was that people started writing open source stuff that actually compiled and ran first time. And some folk were distributing pre-compiled binaries.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
pseudonymous in nc – yes, that particular exchange was brought up by Marc’s PR team. But the facts that are left out of the dispute are
1) The actual coding of the feature was done by Eric Binna who is the real hero of the NCSA story.
2) Tim’s argument was not against the idea of putting images in the Web but Marc’s specific implementation.
3) Marc’s idea was broken and has taken ten years to fix. In particular Marc only thought about including images, he did not think more generally. As a direct result we later ended up losing a half billion dollar lawsuit against the slimeball who claimed to have ‘invented’ the object embedding scheme.
Today we have the IMG tag and a separate include tag.
4) Marc only allowed 14 hours for discussion on the list before releasing his fait acompli.
Tim’s argument was never that his way was best. What he argued was that we could do a better job if we thought about the best way of doing it before making an irrevocable choice.
5) Marc was a plagiarizing asshole. It is a fact that the version of Mosaic in question made no mention of the fact that 60% of the code had been written by CERN, nor was any mention made of the Web. The underlying complaint here was that Marc was stealing Tim’s idea and passing it off as his own.
Later on Marc and Netscape had a book written called ‘Architects of the Web’. There are twelve chapters, each on one particular chapter, can you guess which chapter in the Netscape book was on Tim? Well there wasn’t one.
Still, he got his comeupance in the end after the Redmond club nailed him. And he still does not have the slightest suspicion of the reason Microsoft decided that his company was the one to train all their guns on.
As I said, it will be a fun story when it can be told.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
The Web would not have happened faster under proprietary code because we were busy promoting proprietary and open source code bases at the same time.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. In fact, they don’t really have anything to do with each other at all. If a large company like Microsoft or IBM had purchased HTML and other web technologies early on and pushed them aggressively the web might well have grown faster than it actually did. Just as the market for personal computers really took off after IBM introduced its PC, and just as the market for GUI software interfaces took off with release 3 of Windows.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
So, did the guys at CERN tell you if we are all going to be swallowed by an LHD-born black hole or not? and if so, will it precede being drowned by melting glaciers?
I have real problems like these. i don’t want to waste energy worrying over whether it was Al Gore or Ted Kennedy who invented the internet. (or whether Mixner is more to be pitied than despised.)
Or, did they maybe have a way to figure out the real final vote count in Minnesota? That would be a mitzvah.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Oh and I should also mention that at the time most ‘free’ software did not actually work. Finding code that would compile was a novelty.
It’s not like you should be particularly proud here; IIRC libwww’s build system wasn’t quite as bad as a typical imake project, but….
There was plenty of open source software that compiled just fine in that era, which is how 386BSD and Linux harnessed such huge demand out of the gate (and with Minix/386 as the road barely not taken). Some combination of autoconf and drastic culling of platform diversity has improved things since then of course.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Wait, it’s not a series of tubes?
November 14th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
PHB, fascinating stuff. Would like to know more of the details behind the CERN politics and early WWW history. Apparently you are unwilling to ‘out’ yourself, but nevertheless, thanks for your first-hand experience. I read Tim’s book “Weaving the Web” but unfortunately as you say, he is not a political person, so certain stories remains untold.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Today we have the IMG tag and a separate include tag.
You mean , right? There is no in HTML.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
you mean <frame>, right? There is no <include> But frame and img are totally different things. It was a probably good idea at the time to keep them separate.
November 14th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
’sfunny. Last week, Mixie-No Friends was convinced that the many people who laugh at him were all one person’s creation. Now it’s apparently another. Hilarious. ‘Like a virgin, trolling for the millionth time…’ And I see that he didn’t bother defending his out-of-the-ass line about ‘web software’ either. (Where’s your evidence, Mixie?)
PHB: good stuff. (And it’s a real pleasure to hear from you, as a mere observer during those days. Those stories need to be written, the more the merrier, because there’s a lot of bitrot when it comes to the archive and people’s memories.)
I suppose the retrospective argument on IMG is that it was a quick and dirty hack in an time before access to lossy compression for audio/video and decent non-institutional bandwidth. But I’m certainly not going to wave pom-poms for Marc A.
Now if you agree with RMS that can only mean that either you are RMS or have not met RMS or spoken with him or taken him seriously.
Oh, tell me about it. Arguing with RMS is… wearying. Though he’s less of a bullshit artist than this blog’s resident troll.
November 14th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
e: PHB means [embed]. And his identity isn’t a secret.
November 14th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
And I see that he didn’t bother defending his out-of-the-ass line about ‘web software’ either
Er, tell me what part of #52 you don’t understand, pseudonutjob, and I’ll try to explain it to you. However, since you don’t even seem to understand the difference between a web site and a web server, perhaps all of this is just too technical for you.
November 14th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Anyone who doesn’t understand the ease of use and huge productivity gains of a standardized object interface – as dan does – has absolutely no clue. Imagine that you were given the URLs of a thousand sites and you had to determine whether they were newspapers, blogs, directories, etc. You’d need to manually visit each site under the current scheme.
Under a better scheme, you’d write a program to create an object representing each of those sites. Then – using the same method for all the sites – you’d ask that object “what type of site are you?” and it would return a number: 0 for blogs, 1 for papers, etc. (Highly simplified example)
For another example, some people are forced to write complicated “scrapers” to get things like census data and other tabular data. Under the better plan, (just as an example), the list of charts a site publishes would be available to programs, together with parameters for each: sort by date, etc. Then, the program to get such data from census would be similar or the same as the one that gets data from commerce.
From the user’s perspective, compare a Flash app or a desktop app to things built just using HTML.
November 14th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Nah, Mixie No-Friends, you didn’t explain anything at all. You nitpicked and blustered and bullshitted and dodged the question. That’s what you always do.
Where’s your evidence that “[a]lmost all web software is commercial and proprietary”? You make the assertion, now prove it. It’s not as if you’re busy doing anything else.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
ndm -
My recollection (and again, I could be mis-remembering from the program) was that it was Jobs himself on camera telling the story about his visit to PARC-Xerox and the revelation while there to GUI interfacing.
If I’m remembering wrong, well, sorry. If Jobs was telling fibs on camera, then shame on him. Or maybe Raskin/Wikipedia are getting it wrong.
In any case, the “Or not.” bit seems a tad harsh.
My main point was to alert folks that there’s this pretty entertaining series called “Truimph of the Nerds” from PBS…
November 14th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Or, maybe the web would have grown faster, with the resources of giant corporations behind it earlier in the game, instead of just a handful of academics working on it part-time.
If corporations were so f@()king perfect, they wouldn’t have needed any help.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
PHB: “As I said, it will be a fun story when it can be told.”
I’m looking forward to it. I think you and I both know some ex-Schlumberger people with a part of that story.
Nit: in those days, the phrase “open source” wasn’t in common currency. There were the Free Software people, and there was a disorganized rabble of other people who insisted on using BSD-style licenses, but who had not organized into a coherent alternative to the GNU manifesto.
If I recall correctly, just about the only Free Software projects that were reliable for anything were the software development tool chain. Some would say that’s still true (on bad days, I’m one of them). I’m not sure how much longer event that much will be true. Sigh.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
bubbleandsqueak in nc,
Where’s your evidence that “[a]lmost all web software is commercial and proprietary”?
Sorry, you don’t get to demand evidence for other people’s claims unless you provide evidence for your own.
You listed precisely two examples of open source web software, Apache and Wordpress, apparently oblivious to the proprietary nature of the vast majority of web sites and web applications, web development software and web infrastructure software. The single most commonly used piece of web software is probably Internet Explorer, which is of course proprietary to Microsoft.
November 15th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Sorry, you don’t get to demand evidence for other people’s claims unless you provide evidence for your own.
You listed precisely two examples of open source web software, Apache and Wordpress, apparently oblivious to the proprietary nature of the vast majority of web sites and web applications, web development software and web infrastructure software. The single most commonly used piece of web software is probably Internet Explorer, which is of course proprietary to Microsoft.
Actually, Firefox holds a marketshare roughly equal to IE7 and IE6 combined.
Statistics I’ve seen indicate that Apache is powering around 75 percent of web servers.
A large percentage of web servers are running Linux. Anecdotal I know, but when I was searching for hosting providers for a number of projects I sourced, just about every company I looked at was running Linux.
MySQL shows up -very- frequently in the backend.
My experience is that the claim that the vast majority of web infrastructure software is proprietary is complete nonsense.
November 15th, 2008 at 2:04 am
Wow, Virgin Mixie No-Friends takes the cake on this one.
He initiates an assertion: “Almost all web software is commercial and proprietary.”
He’s asked to back it up with evidence. And now he’s running away because he knows it was bullshit, while trying to change the definition of “web software” to mean “browsers” and vaguely-defined “web sites”.
So let’s assume, absent clarification, that Mixie didn’t have a clue what he meant when he referred to “web software”. He just has a set of tropes, like a fucked-up chatbot. So predictable, so tiresome, so pathetic.
November 15th, 2008 at 2:25 am
Actually, Firefox holds a marketshare roughly equal to IE7 and IE6 combined.
According to Wikipedia:
IE: 71%
Firefox: 20%
Statistics I’ve seen indicate that Apache is powering around 75 percent of web servers.
Same source:
Apache: 50%
A large percentage of web servers are running Linux.
Linux is a general-purpose operating system. I don’t think it reasonably qualifies as “web software” simply because some web servers run on it. But if we are to include Linux for that reason, then we must also include all versions Windows that host web servers. Windows Vista. Windows XP. Windows 2000. Windows Me. Windows 98. And the many flavors of Windows Server.
MySQL shows up -very- frequently in the backend.
MySQL isn’t exactly “open software”. It’s owned by Sun, which holds copyright on the code, and the source is made available under both GPL and proprietary licenses. Of course, there are also many competing proprietary database products, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and DB2.
My experience is that the claim that the vast majority of web infrastructure software is proprietary is complete nonsense.
Given the facts I provide above, your experience doesn’t seem to be worth much.
The overwhelming majority of web software consists of web sites and web applications themselves, from web app giants like Google and Yahoo to retailers like Amazon and Walmart. Even sites developed with and powered by open source products are themselves mostly proprietary. They are owned and controlled by the website owner. This obviously includes all sites in the .com (commercial) domain, as well as government, educational and personal web sites. And of course there are numerous proprietary technologies and development tools, most obviously Microsoft’s vast product net (ASP, .NET, Silverlight, Visual Studio, etc.), Adobe (Flash, Shockwave, ColdFusion, etc.), Sun (Java), and so on.
November 15th, 2008 at 2:31 am
He’s asked to back it up with evidence.
I just told you, bubbleandsqueak, you don’t get to demand evidence for anyone else’s claims until you provide evidence for your own. Get to it.
trying to change the definition of “web software” to mean “browsers” and vaguely-defined “web sites”.
I didn’t “change the definition” at all. If you don’t think web browsers are a part of web software, you’re an idiot. But we knew that. And if you don’t know what a web site is, I guess it’s not surprising that you confuse it with a web server.
November 15th, 2008 at 2:43 am
You made the initial claim, Virgin Mixie No-Friends. Back it up or STFU.
And no, claiming that a “personal web site” is proprietary “web software” really won’t wash, when you stated earlier that
You’re full of shit, and in full-on sputter mode, as always when you get caught bullshitting because you’re too much of a coward to admit it. Hilarious.
November 15th, 2008 at 3:04 am
You made the initial claim, Virgin Mixie No-Friends. Back it up or STFU.
You don’t seem to be listening, you obsessively masturbating escaped lunatic, you. You don’t get to demand evidence for the claims of others until you provide evidence for you own. Where’s your evidence, nutjob? If you don’t have it, STFU.
And no, claiming that a “personal web site” is proprietary “web software” really won’t wash, when you stated earlier that I don’t think most blogs properly count as software at all
Since you’re obviously too dumb to figure out the difference, which is not surprising given your confusion of web sites and web servers, I’ll spell it out for you. Personal websites that do not contain any real original software of their own cannot reasonably be considered “web software.” Most blogs would fall into this category since all the blogger supplies is text or other media content. Many other personal websites do however contain significant original programming and would therefore qualify as software. If you weren’t such an ignorant moron you might have been able to figure this out for yourself.
November 15th, 2008 at 3:28 am
LOL. Let’s recall the initial claim that Virgin Mixie No-Friends made upthread:
If Mixie had the stats to prove that, he’d have done it by now.
Unless, of course, he’s a bad-faith troll who decides to wipe his double-wide ass with any credible definition of “software” so that — oh, who the fuck knows what he means. He’s just a bullshit artist who’s been called out and humiliated yet again.
Still, for shits and giggles:
“Almost all of Virgin Mixie No-Friends’ sexual encounters have been with his right hand.”
By his own rules, Virgin Mixie No-Friends doesn’t get to demand evidence for the claims of others until he provides evidence for his own. And if he doesn’t have it, STFU.
November 15th, 2008 at 3:29 am
Nothing much to contribute, just a gratuitous fuck you to Mixner…hey, its Friday night and he IS being a dick.
November 15th, 2008 at 3:48 am
If Mixie had the stats to prove that, he’d have done it by now. Unless, of course, he’s a bad-faith troll who decides to wipe his double-wide ass
If bubbleandsqueak in nc had the stats to prove any of his claims, he’d have done it by now. Unless, of course, he’s a drooling brain-dead moron who shits himself uncontrollably and then screams for his mama to wipe it up.
November 15th, 2008 at 4:02 am
pseudonymous, mixner just gave you a long list of proprietary software used on the web. If you think you have a similar list of open source products, let’s see it.
November 15th, 2008 at 4:19 am
Mixner is correct. Yes, a lot of sites run on Apache and are built with open source tools, but the website code itself is proprietary. Millions of websites. Billions of lines of code. Think how much proprietary software Google and Microsoft churn out every year. And Job ads are always looking for ASP.NET and SQL Server skills. I don’t see much demand for open source stuff.
November 15th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Mixner just gave a long argument that the web runs primarily on proprietary software. To supply evidence, he provided citations from Wikipedia– an open source site running on open source software.
November 15th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Let me just take it from a user’s perspective (since it’s what I’ve got.)
From the standpoint of a comic-book writer with an Apple /// and then a Mac, there was CompuServe –and there were BBS’s. Friends of mine ran some. I had other friends working at Bell Labs and at the University of Chicago who would regale me with stuff they posted on net.religion, but I never thought about entering that world, which sounded to me like just an elaboration of water-cooler talk and politics. (I was wrong, of course, but that’s not the point.)
The action was all on the BBS’s. It was DIY, you could set one up yourself without official approval or a ton of money.
I was attracted to AOL because of the graphic interface (and the fact that it was Mac only, but I got what I think was a good taste of what a for-profit Net would be like: having to click through an ad every time you wanted to change screens, arrow-key navigation, and censorship.
AOL was fun and useful, but when the Web came along, the thing that convinced me that it was a great thing is that it allowed the BBS culture to migrate into it.
And while e-commerce and all that stuff is cool, it is that ancestral BBS culture that created the netroots.
If we had a corporate net, in a post-9/11 world political sites and discussion groups of the scurrilous Dhimmicrat variety might well have been shut down, and people’s Internet Accounts cancelled. In that case it would have been back to the dial-up BBSes for political agitation. It would be tougher,and Barack Hussein Obama wouldn’t be president, but all would not be lost.
As a resolute non-programmer, content is what’s important to me, and I’m not alone. I recognize my slant, and try to point out to my resolutely programmer friends their slant towards process.
The argument (or flame-wr) about commercial vs. free/open source web software is the wrong frame: If I’m doing a DIY project, and there’s a commercial tool I can buythat will make it easier, of course I buy it, if the price is right. You buy Photoshop or Dreamweaver because it kicks ass. But you can use open source equivalents if you want.
In a corporate web you’ll have proprietary formats and proprietary development tools and accounts that could be cancelled at any point at the whim of the owners. Sure you’d have a big Amazon.com like bookstore, and a big Second Life virtual amusement park, and you’d probably have TV set top boxes that really worked.
But it would still be Prodigy, and the BBS culture would not be a part of it.
November 15th, 2008 at 8:19 am
In communications, regulation is far more important than technology – there are numerous technologies that can do the job, some proprietary, some open source, but there is only one regulatory regime. Regulation deals with issues like interoperability (think IM where Yahoo and AOL dont really talk) and how tied are delivery and content creation. Interoperability means that the content creator builds their stuff once, not multiple times for different platforms (a huge economy of scale). Cleanly separating the ownership of the delivery platform from the content means that small guys can enter the market and compete with the AT&Ts and Comcasts of the world.
This battle is being fought today in the world of video – will content creators be able to sell directly to consumers or will they need to go through intermediaries and bundlers (like the TV networks and cable companies).
Regulation shapes economics and economics drive technology
November 15th, 2008 at 10:06 am
pbg @89: there was CompuServe – and there were BBS’s. Friends of mine ran some.
We seem to be of similar vintage. Remember when CompuServe introduced CB — jokily named after the 70s citizens’ band radio craze — for real-time text interaction? It read a lot like a twitterfest.
…which is my curmudgeonly point: as with the CB name, humans are very very good at assimilating the new to the known. A week ago I sat through an agency presentation by 20-something neurocognitive marketroids on the transformative wonders of Web 2.0 and social networking, thinking all the while: Yes, fine, it does make a difference when this stuff is used by masses rather than scattered geeks (that’s why you have your jobs). Yes, it does make a difference when TCP/IP and cheap tiny hardware makes it available everywhere 24/7. But let’s not get carried away about the Radically New Consciousness that comes along with it. More is sometimes different, but more often it’s more.
November 15th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Dear Matt: I know I’m very late to this post, and I apologize in advance for wasting the time of all the technogeeks who have already posted comments.
But I have to know, and I think I speak for millions of my fellow Americans when I ask.
Is the Large Hadrian Collider guarded by sharks with laser beams on their heads? And if not, why not?
November 15th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
jmo/elmo:
Virgin Mixie No-Friends came up with a sprawling list of items that vary from ’software’ to ‘not really software at all’ without discussing their relative importance or prevalence, which is why I guessed he’d rely on fudging an already-vague definition once he had to defend it.
That’s to say, Mixie is going to argue along the lines that a static HTML or CSS file counts as “a piece of web software” of equal weight to an instance of Apache, the PHP or Perl interpreter, a non-proprietary Wiki/CMS written in one of those languages, the ImageMagick or GD libraries.
Anyway, 91 million measured instances of Apache is enough to disprove a statement as dumb and sweeping as “[a]lmost all web software is commercial and proprietary”. That’s Mixie’s problem: he likes the big lie.
It helps that he has a few major tells: whenever he does his little “you don’t get to demand evidence blah blah blah” routine, he’s bullshitting and knows it.
November 15th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
elmo,
If you read pseudonutjob’s posts you will soon learn that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. On anything.
Your point about the proprietary nature of websites themselves echoes what I said earlier. A website is not open software merely because it was created with open source tools or runs on Apache. That’s like claiming a proprietary application is open because it was written in C using an open source text editor.
November 15th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Anyway, 91 million measured instances of Apache is enough to disprove a statement as dumb and sweeping as “[a]lmost all web software is commercial and proprietary”.
Yet again you display your appalling ignorance. The one billion “instances” of just one piece of proprietary web software, Internet Explorer, swamps the “instances” of Apache.
November 15th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Anthony Damiani:
Mixner just gave a long argument that the web runs primarily on proprietary software. To supply evidence, he provided citations from Wikipedia– an open source site running on open source software.
Here is Alexa’s list of the top 100 global web sites. The top five are Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Windows Live and Facebook. All proprietary. The highest-ranking open source site is Wikipedia, at #8. As far as I can tell, there are only two or three other open source sites in the entire list.
November 15th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Anthony Damiani:
Mixner just gave a long argument that the web runs primarily on proprietary software. To supply evidence, he provided citations from Wikipedia– an open source site running on open source software.
Here is Alexa’s list of the top 100 global web sites. The top five are Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Windows Live and Facebook. All proprietary. The highest-ranking open source site is Wikipedia, at #8. As far as I can tell, there are only two or three other open source sites in the entire list.
November 15th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Like I said, having been caught bullshitting, Virgin Mixie No-Friends is dancing around trying to make “software” and “almost all” mean something other than “software” and “almost all”.
If Mixie were less prone to outrageous bullshit when playing Contrarian Argument Bot, he’d be caught with his pants down much less often. (He’s still smarting from being ignorant of the number of constitutional amendments added over the last 200 years, poor silly thing.)
November 15th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
pseudonymous, last time I checked 1 billion was a whole lot more than 91 million. And 3 open source websites in the top 100 ain’t too impressive either. You’ve provided nothing to counter mixner’s evidence except bluster.
November 16th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
I think the forerunners to the web weren’t so much Compuserve and the other subscription-based services but the worldwide array of dial-up BBSs that preceded it.
I got my first modem before Reagan was elected to a second term. 300/1200 baud may not have been a dedicated connection but the attitude (you suck prove you don’t) was already present (people were already exchanging ideas, and software); you had ten year olds hacking systems.
These things should be preserved.
November 16th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Here is the book that was nearly confiscated by my middle school English teacher (who looked a great deal like Linda Tripp).
If you’re going to study an era start with the original texts.
November 16th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Several things.
A. I was one of the first network admins at Xerox as they implemented their internal client server networks and upgraded simple proprietary protocols in the seven layer model. In fact the ubiquity of Adobe and Postscript, a rival to Xerox’ Interpress, may well have been the standard type of document on the WWW. The founders of that company, originally at Xerox, were very well aware of internetworked documents. It would have been simple for them to implement a lighter weight markup language suitable for hypertexting. As someone else has noted, billions have been spent making up for the deficiencies of HTML.
B. Anyone who thinks that Jared Diamond has any credibility whatsoever should understand at a high level that all of this technology was inevitable and whether it was proprietary or not has little to do with what happens at a worldwide level. It’s like asking whether Christianity would be larger today if nobody were required to tithe.
C. Are you Bob Earle the mathmetician with patents on multidimensional databases? I’m on the arborpath.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:47 am
jmo: Last time I checked, a web browser without websites served on web servers running on operating systems is pretty fucking useless. The web is what it is, and became what it is, on account of non-proprietary software, and anyone arguing otherwise is a liar or a fool.
Oh, and a web page is ‘web software’ in the way that a Word document is ‘word processing software’. It’s an input source.
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