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Remembering 50 Years of (and Leading Up To) the Internet
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Sep 28, 2008 12:12 AM
from the let's-cut-them-some-slack-on-the-nomenclature dept.
from the let's-cut-them-some-slack-on-the-nomenclature dept.
katrina writes "Covering the infamous MafiaBoy bank hack, the launch of the first ever online newspaper — MIT's 'The Tech' — and Brewster Kahle developing the Internet Archive back in 1996, five decades of the most significant Internet developments, hacks, legal battles and innovations have been documented in a massive historical article on Cnet UK."
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Submission: Remebering 50 years of the Internet by Anonymous Coward
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wait a minute... 50 years (Score:2, Funny)
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The article is woefully inadequate.
- Where's the discussion about email's invention?
- Or Usenet?
- Or Fidonet (similar to usenet)?
- And he completely ignored Electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) which were the precursor to modern web forums. From 1980 to circa 1995, the BBS was how people communicated online.
- Another important facet is the gradually increasing speeds from 0.3k up to 56k modems, without which we'd still be using just pure text scrolling on screen at a snail's pace.
This article is not a
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Ooops. Excuse me while I extricate my foot from my mouth. They discuss email and usenet on pages 5 and 6. My bad! :-(
Still, they did neglect BBSes and Modems in my opinion. Hobbyist BBSes created most of the standards upon which the web is built, and how successful would the internet be if we all still used 0.3k modems?
Worst Slashdot Editing EVAR (Score:5, Insightful)
The title of the article is "The 50 most significant moments of Internet history", the title of the Slashdot story? "Remembering 50 Years of (and Leading Up To) the Internet" .. whatever, the fuck, that means.
Disgrace.
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Some people mistaking think the World Wide Web is "the internet". Therefore anything pre-WWW is "leading up to" the the internet's birth (in their view).
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Agreed. If you have an hour to waste by clicking on Next Page links to read a poorly-researched and graphics-heavy "article," then it's hard to go wrong here.
If you indeed are curious about the history of the net, this isn't a bad start [wikipedia.org].
Been waiting 10 years for a system to moderate Slashdot submissions and "editors" instead of just comments, guess I'll wait a while longer.
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"Remembering 50 Years of (and Leading Up To) the Internet" .. whatever, the fuck, that means.
It means I walked barefoot in the snow to go to school and fight in WWII when I was a little boy and the dinosuars roamed the earth. Now get off my lawn. You don't know how easy you have it!
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Watch out. The editors have started modding complaints down again.
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It's actually about 50 events spanning on 40 years (Score:5, Informative)
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Internet time, ya know. http://www.swatch.com/us_en/internettime.html [swatch.com]
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Yeah, I was thinking how Al Gore could have created it so young. Really a prodigious!
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Forget the Problematic Summary (Score:5, Informative)
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What's with the "next photo" shit?
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The article sucked. As others have pointed out, it was
a
little
bit
of
content
spread
out
over
many
many
slow
to
load
pages.
Two mentions of Digg? Not one of Slashdot, even in the top 100 (though goatse, sigh, was mentioned)?
Not a single mention of Unix, Linux or Open Source software or the GPL?
Add this article to its own category EPIC FAIL.
Re: (Score:1)
Read the article instead - it appears to be concise, well-written and nicely formatted. It looks like a job well done by cnet UK.
How can you say this about an article that mixes up basic terms like "the internet" and "the web"?
The Tech (Score:1)
And the reporting the The Tech sucks as much as it ever has. Oh how the times have changed (and haven't)
While digg makes the list ... (Score:5, Insightful)
.. Slashdot doesn't, not even in the 100 most significant moments. I don't get it.
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1.Slashdot is editor-driven(mostly,and for largest chunk of time).
2.Its not that big.Slashdot-effect doesn't work on modern hardware.
3.Slashdot stories are second-hand information,and most value is in user comments.Not particularly important since there are better designed forums which deal with variety of topics daily,that slashdot briefly comments on for a few days.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
3.Slashdot stories are second-hand information,and most value is in user comments.
Duh.
But come on, two entries for Digg when sites like Slashdot and FreeRepublic.com were there first (and are better done)?
It's a nice history... (Score:2)
...but it seems the internet is about to lose it's future. It's sad how they want to tear down one of the better tools humanity has come up with in the recent years.
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Approaching it from the rear end, sir.
Considering that goatse made the list, that's an oddly appropriate, though still disturbing, comment.
Java (Score:1, Insightful)
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This list seems incomplete, it makes no mention of Java, not even in the honorable mentions!
Nor any mention of FORTRAN[1], Perl[2], MySQL, PostgreSQL, any Unix[3], etc.
Sigh.
[1] The successful proof of concept that proved once and for all that hand crafted assembly language was a lose.
[2] Perl came before Java and is significant in the fact that it was the first large-scale community developed language. Arguably, Perl has a larger contribution to the web than Java.
[3] BSD Unix was the Reference Implementation for the Arpanet.
Apple's Internet? (Score:2)
Didn't Apple have their own version of the net sometime in the early 90's? I think they went belly up in 95 or 96.
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Which reminds me of the unrelated, but similar Quantum Link (Q-Link) for the Commodore 64: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link [wikipedia.org] - It started in 1984 and eventually evolved into America Online which still operates the AOL and Netscape Dialup ISPs.
Q-Link charged 6 cents per minute of online time.
I'm glad services today offer "unlimited time", because that 6 cents per minute added up fast! My parents hated me for running-up their bills, but I justified it by saying, "it's educational". ;-)
Original HTTP deamon developed by NCSA... (Score:3, Interesting)
The article says that Apache "succeeded the HTTP daemon developed by Rob McCool in the 70s".
Surely they mean the 90s, when the HTTP protocol was invented?
(The statement is backed by a reference to The Telecommunications Illustrated Dictionary which also says he developed it in the 1970s...)
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no, i type my PI number into the AT machine.
Where's The Print Button??? (Score:1)
Greatest of condolences to our new CBS Overlords.
Youtube (Score:2)
Neglected huge items for the recent "hot" things.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Neglected huge items for the recent "hot" thing (Score:2)
Want something significant to ignore? Tymnet - the world's largest commercial network - in 1976.
Actually, I don't expect much else from an article written by some 20-somethings.
Berners-Lee must be a Prozac addict (Score:2)
To see exactly where the World Wide Web is going, what progress now looks like, try to save a flattened copy of that entire article to a local file, either as HTML or perhaps as an OO or DOC file; you'll have to use a doo-dad like the AntiPagination or RePagination extensions for Firefox, unless you want to drive yourself nuts trying to successively cut and paste each of the twelve pages.
What you initially get when you're done is mostly not even the article at all: it's all "secondary" page content. When t
Kid these days (Score:2)
When I was your age, we had to flip through printed pages full of ads to follow news stories that were continued on page 42. And then someone had torn out that one because the crossword puzzle was on the back.
And the ink smudged and got all over everything as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Point of your rapier wit taken. I remember those good old days, too; it's why I quit reading magazines eventually. We needed something a bit more idealistic there and then, too, I think. Maybe this means I'll "quit the Web" eventually, too... but not today. At least for now I can tweak, edit, and censor the Web in ways that I couldn't edit those magazines, when the only editorial tool I had was a pair of scissors.
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Talking about the invention of 4chan is like talking about the invention of masturbation: It was bound to happen, we all do it from time to time, and it won't ever be discussed on CNet.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No kidding!
I'm sure the article is great and wonderful, but I made a decision a few months ago to no longer bother with any site that splits their
articles
needlessly
across
multiple
pages.
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Hurrah! to that!
To be serious, there is a part of hypertext theory that states that texts the size of one page on a screen are good. The idea is that users are unable or unwilling to read on and get the message.
However, you and I, and I guess a lot more people, don't like these small chopped up texts. I think that is because we are used to reading long non-trivial texts like novels, scientific papers and the like. Now bear in mind that since the Internet took off the number of less educated people on the In
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Do they make more money when we view 1 page of ads or 12? Are they catering to us or the money?
If they weren't targeting the advertisement money versus dedicated readers they could have the option of viewing 1 or 2 pages with ads instead of 12.
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I think it's probably advertising. Why just expose the reader to 1 advertisement when you can make it 12.
It's asinine. I mean I guess the argument could be made that it's like turning the pages in a book, but to counter that there is the fact that if I flip the page in a book, I don't have to wait for the page to load. Let alone have to look at lots of superfluous junk that has no bearing on what I'm trying to read.
One article - many pages (Score:2)
I did not see a link in the article to put it all one page. I understand the temptation to garner additional ad revenue for laying out the article this way, but I appreciate even more when they provide a "print this article" or "show on one page" link for those of us who. don't. like. interrupted. reading.
Here's a plug for the Firefox addon: Re-pagination [mozilla.org]. Just right click on the "Next" link at the top of the article and then select "Re-Pagination > All". Not perfect, but it gets the job done.
Alt
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