Internaut Day Might Not Be the Web Anniversary You're Looking For (fortune.com) 70
David Meyer, reporting for Fortune: The web arguably went public before August 23, 1991. Social media users are enthusiastically celebrating "Internaut Day" on Tuesday. They're thanking Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, for first providing public access to it on this day in 1991, precisely a quarter of a century back. The only problem is that the supposed importance of Internaut Day doesn't seem to be supported by much evidence. Berners-Lee submitted his seminal proposal for a new information management system to CERN on March 12, 1989, a date which Berners-Lee celebrates as the birthday of the web. The building blocks were specified and written up by October 1990, and the first webpage went live in December that year. So when somebody celebrates the "Internaut Day" today, it really doesn't seem like the right occasion. The report adds: According to Wikipedia, that's when "new users could [first] access" the web -- and that's what a gazillion news stories on Tuesday are supposedly celebrating. But it doesn't square with what the Web Foundation and CERN say.
Shocking. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The first real breakthrough wasn't the web (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
I would pin it on the introduction of Usenet News in 1979.
Prior to that you were limited by the size of membership on the BBS you were dialing into.
Usenet News made the interactions Global, and we have not looked back since then
Far earlier breakthroughs (Score:1)
The invention of the telegraph and the wide-scale availability to the paying masses through commercial telegraph operators was arguably the first real breakthrough in electronic digital communications, assuming you consider the "on/off" of Morse-code-type telegraphy to be digital, which I do.
Smoke signals, semaphore signals, and other forms of non-electronic long-distance communication are also typically digital. As to whether they were "available to the masses" or not, that varies.
Writing, whether using a
Re: (Score:1)
Topic-specific printed non-professionally-run newsletters did much the same as USENET groups did in bringing together people from around the globe who had similar interests. Granted, they weren't as fast (USENET typically circulated the globe in 24-48 hours in the early days, with some "high-cost-to-deliver" sites taking days or a week or more to get updates).
Amateur radio also had (and still has) similar communities-of-interest but, due to the way radio works, it's difficult to have a true "world-wide" co
Reminds me, I was late to the party in 1996 (Score:2)
That reminds me of when I thought I was far too late in starting my first web business, in 1996. I lamented that there would have been a lot of potential if I had gotten in early, but the web had already been around for five years. Why hadn't I gotten in early, darn it! :)
Yeah, so? (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering that a large portion of the globe believe and celebrate the birth of a god on Dec 25th, despite the fact that there is no evidence at all that this truely happened, I think we can probably let this inaccuracy slide.
At least we know the internet really did happen.
Re:Yeah, so? (Score:5, Interesting)
No evidence Jesus was born on Dec 25th? Yes, we already know this. No evidence Jesus was born? No, the evidence is pretty solid. Evidence Jesus was God? Evidence, but highly disputed.
Seeing as you've no links, allow me to retort. Nope, no solid evidence that the biblical Jesus was a real historical person. Nope, no evidence whatsoever that he was "god" (note the lower case G).
It sounds like you're presupposing that the abrahamic god exists, so let me just point out that there's just as much evidence for Zeus.
Thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
a fact you have no support for other than a book filled with fallacies so... it must be "fact" also superman
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, that is amazing considering people wrote about him who were alive at the same time he is purported to.
Actually none of the gospels are believed by scholars to have been written by contemporaries of Jesus.
The dead sea scrolls mention Jesus like figures, yes in the plural, which could have formed the basis of the JC written about a hundred years after his death.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The "David" character seems likely to have existed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Next time you want to make shit up and mix in your own guesswork, make sure a simple Wikipedia search doesn't prove you wrong.
The vast majority of scholars who write on the subject agree that Jesus existed, although scholars differ about the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the biblical accounts, and the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
When you're done trying to impress people with your shallow understanding of things, look into the work of Bart Ehrman. He wrote a bunch of books on this topic and it's truly fascinating, even for people (like me) who are not religious. His stuff is mostly academic, not dogmatic.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Jesus was only a demigod - his mother was human.
Re: (Score:2)
Jesus was only a demigod - his mother was human.
Then why he isn't in any of the Riordan novels?
Hyper-linking was invented in the 60's .... (Score:2)
Not sure why Tim gets credit when hyper-linking was demo'd back in 1968 ...
The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Alan Kay points out the same thing @17:03
Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful
https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t... [youtu.be]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
3-4 years prior to RoboBoard was a system called FirstClass (originally macintosh only) that was started to be a groupware 'learning management system' but was heavily utilized as BBS software as well.
It provided email and forums (even with fidonet support, although mainly via 3rd party software as FCs remained pretty lacking), voice/fax, file transfer, etc and the protocol was multithreaded so you could be doing all of those things at the same time, and all over a 1200 baud modem.
It was primary used with a
Re: (Score:2)
If you go by that "mother of demos", then apple did not invent the mouse and that is heresy. So its clearly a fake!
Re: (Score:2)
Semantics (Score:3)
It sounds like everyone is arguing about semantics. What is considered the actual "birth date"?
I'm a web developer. What is considered the birth date of a website? When the client comes to me with a proposal or I go to them with one? If I was Berners-Lee, it sounds like that is the birth date of the website. If the site is ready for internal testing, is that the birth date? That sounds like what CERN says it is when it was available internally but possibly not externally. Or is the site's birth date when it's publicly available, ready for the world to see and use, which is what I would call it.
Or putting it in human terms, Berners-Lee's birth date sounds more like the date of conception, CERN's date more like when you have an ultrasound and you know it's there and can "see" it but it's not ready for the world yet, and publicly accessible when the little guy actually shoots out of mom.
Re: (Score:2)
Wikipedia cites its sources. If journalists did the same, we would find out they get everything from Wikipedia, instead of looking to see where Wikipedia got it.
Except when journalists go to Wikipedia and quote it, then a Wikipedia editor goes back and attributes the journalist's article as the source of the information found in the Wikipedia article.
To commemorate this occasion (Score:2)
Internet or hyper-linked documents (a.k.a. Web)? (Score:3)
And Sir Lee's was not even the first system for linking documents/files across the networks — Gopher [wikipedia.org] was. And Gopher was not merely proposed in 1991, that's when an actual system became available (though protocol was codified in an RFC [ietf.org] only in 1993).
Re: (Score:2)
The write-up and TFA conflate the Internet and (what became known as web). Maybe, the slines don't know any better, but Slashdot users ought to... The hyperlinked documents weren't the first "killer application" — e-mail [wikipedia.org] was. The first systems weren't even using the Internet, but, according to Wikipedia:
And Sir Lee's was not even the first system for linking documents/files across the networks — Gopher [wikipedia.org] was. And Gopher was not merely proposed in 1991, that's when an actual system became available (though protocol was codified in an RFC [ietf.org] only in 1993).
If you want to get "technical" the web (aka http/html) was first (1990 vs 1991 for gopher), but the graphical browser mosaic didn't appear until '93 and not to many folks were using the non-graphical web servers that were in existence at the time.
If email was the killer app, inter-domain mail (via unix mail via rmail/UUCP) was probably the real killer app, not ARPANET email as ARPANET was mostly restricted to non-commercial use. Gopher like the "web" didn't really pop up until '91 when the NSFNET (the mode
Re: (Score:2)
I would say, Lee's web was indistinguishable from Gopher back then. Certainly not until Mosaic offered graphical browsing.
But that too existed already in the 1970-80ies [wikipedia.org]... The actual interconnections remained scarce, but software and protocols for distinct computers to exchange "emails" appeared much
But... (Score:3)
Link to a copy of the original proposal (Score:3)
March, 1989
https://www.w3.org/History/198... [w3.org]
It's a misnomer anyways (Score:1)
Interwebinaut Day would be more fitting.
The Internet was arguably invented either in 1969 or when IPv4 rolled out in the early 1980s, depending on whether you "count" the pre-IPv4 Internet as "the Internet" or not.
Lighten up, Francis (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
people do have their names :)
Not really; according to the US Census Bureau, there are about 1800 Americans with my (first+last) name. And probably a whole bunch of them have the same middle name, which is also one of the top 10 men's names in the US. My parents didn't have much imagination when it came to baby names.
OTOH, my wife continues to use her birth name for most purposes (which is fine by me). She likes the fact that, as far as she can determine, she's the only living human with that name. (And it's not even some unprono
And Columbus discovered America (Score:2)
Film at 11.
Should be NCSA Mosaic Day (Score:3)
Look, WWW is all nice and stuff, but frankly before NCSA Mosaic was released you could not really tell the difference between Gopher and WWW, and while they were interesting to play with, it was just play (unlike USENET News which had real value :). Somehow Viola never had much impact either.
NCSA Mosaic was originally released January 23, 1993. I gasped when I first saw it, because I had been dreaming of a global hypermedia network, and it showed that was possible. That day changed my life from someone who was an electrical engineer to someone who designed early commercial web sites.
Version 1.0 for Windows was released on November 11, 1993, and of course that is when "normal human beings" had any chance of getting on the Web.
Just call a birthday a birthday (Score:1)