The Internet

[Alan H]

25 things you might not know about the web on its 25th birthday

It sprang from the brain of one man, Tim Berners-Lee, and is the fastest-growing communication medium of all time. A quarter-century on, we examine how the web has transformed our lives

[Dave B]

Interesting that, the whole picture seems far too complex now for any one person to understand, the article inevitably posed as many questions as it answered.

I am quite interested, in a casual way, with machines understanding the nuances and context of language. I get the feeling that there are lots of small developments in this area, any interaction with message "recognition" systems at Amazon and other places indicates this. You no longer get a person selecting the appropriate, "We are sorry you have had a bad experience with . . ." reply from a selection on a screen as an answer, a compute does this now! And gets it equally as wrong . . .

Voice recognition on my tablet is still primitive, but a lot better than it was ten years ago. After going through a computer led vocal questionnaire when phoning the tax man I lost my temper when it got it wrong three times in a row. I half expected it to tell me, "You are a very rude person and I can't do things like that anyway"!

[Alan H]

Missed this at the time, but you can now browse the first web pages on the WWW: The birth of the web

[Dave B]

Facinating with just a quick look, interesting to see just how much TBL worked out even then!

Nice to see that even he made bloopers though:

HTTP enhancements
Format conversion, authorization, better logging information for statistics.
Mail manager
A hypertext view of a mail archive with lists of messages by author, topic, with links between messages. A friendly face on a mail archive would be a great project management tool.
HTTP enhancements
Format conversion, authorization, better logging information for statistics.

Must have really wanted those enhancements!

[Tetenterre]

Hah! Anyone else remember using Lynx?

[Alan H]

Hah! Anyone else remember using Lynx?

Lynx? No, I use Right Gua... Oh. No.

[Dave B]

I seem to remember "bulletin boards", in DOS, used by a university tutor friend in about 1990ish

Wikki says:

A bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer server running custom software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through email, public message boards, and sometimes via direct chatting. Many BBSes also offer on-line games, in which users can compete with each other, and BBSes with multiple phone lines often provide chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks and other aspects of the Internet. Low-cost, high-performance modems drove online use through the early 1990s, both online services and BBSes. Infoworld estimated there were 60,000 BBS systems serving 17 million users in the US alone in 1994, a collective market much larger than the major online services like CompuServe.

[Tetenterre]

Yup, Starbase One was the UK astronomy BBS in the 1990s. Y-modem, Z-modem ... thinking 2400 baud was great because it was so much faster than 300 ... getting my 386 Tosh and being excited because it had a hard disk - a whole 10MB!

Lynx, BTW, was a DOS (& probably other OSs) browser - text only, of course, from the same era.