YcatX on 12/3/2014 at 20:45
Ahhhh... BBS and the time of 300 baud modems...
Nicker on 12/3/2014 at 20:59
I didn't understand what the Interweb was until I saw my first page of hypertext. It was first described to me as the information highway or pipeline, and coming from Alberta, land of pipelines and highways, that created a very specific and limiting image for me.
But hypertext. That was the big AHA!
What's sad about the BBC article is reading the posts from all the Eeeyores who think even attempting to codify a charter for the web is pointless. Let's not bother trying anything just in case it doesn't work. And I thought I was a miserable cuss. Makes me embarrassed to be depressed.
Yakoob on 13/3/2014 at 01:33
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
The internet is to wild for a bill of rights to really mean anything IMHO.
Sadly, I gotta agree, and it's too decentralized to be governed by a single bill. We can't even get a limited number of nations to work together in UN or EU, so good luck coordinating the whole world.
(also, in before UN/EU is much more complex than internet hurrrr)
Quote Posted by demagogue
I went to university in 1995 right when the internet (www) was getting up and running on a wide scale. Before then, in the early 90s, there was BBS, where you had to dial into a page individually.
The transition happened very fast. I remember some orientation on the computer lab right at the start of college introducing it, and getting Netscape Navigator on a CD from some table passing it out on campus. Still the familiar static hiss like BBS from the phoneline, and getting cut when a call came in. And the pages were so primitive then, just text and a few gifs in a simple table at best, but things improved by the month it seemed.
Haha, I know what you mean, I remember that too, in fact I get reminded of it a lot - it hurts my little webdev heart to see how many people are stuck in the 90s design mindset....
demagogue on 13/3/2014 at 12:40
The other thing I remember is I took a class on web development like late 1996 and learned HTML & a few tricks (technically "computer mediated communication"; web design was just incidental), and suddenly I was in high demand. People were offering me like $200 to make a webpage for them. I'd just use a template and fit their company into it. I was doing all the borders and links in Photoshop & putting the HTML code in by hand with these elaborate designs! What a crazy time.
Chimpy Chompy on 13/3/2014 at 15:08
I kind of miss those old days of garish hand-built websites. I used to have a site I built, now I just say sod it and take a wordpress off the shelf. Somehow that feels like a big loss. But I'm never going to find the time to build something modern looking, with the same capabilities, from scratch.
Jason Moyer on 13/3/2014 at 16:55
Er, 25 years? I'm not even sure what mistake people are making here by celebrating this as some sort of anniversary. The internet is older than that, and the world wide web is younger than that.
Chimpy Chompy on 13/3/2014 at 18:04
25 years since Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of the web at CERN, apparently. Depend what you want to call the web's "birth" - the proposal, the first functioning server, the first publicly available server?
Jason Moyer on 13/3/2014 at 19:22
November 11th, 1993 is probably the date I'd use to celebrate WWW anniversaries (Mosaic 1.0). That was the point where the focus of the internet began shifting from email, usenet, and gopher to the WWW. The internet itself is a little more nebulous since the merging of the various local and regional networks into a true internet was a gradual process that took decades.
