Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:11:28 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: "Michael Slavitch" <slavitch () gmail com> Date: August 19, 2008 10:20:21 AM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet Reply-To: slavitch () gmail comI was at a seminar in the early 1990's put on by a CERN researcher named Tim Berners-Lee. HTTP was at such an early stage that the demonstration required someone's borrowed NeXT workstation and the core group that remained could sit at a table for eight at a Malaysian restaurant. The original group was somewhat larger. Sadly a C level of a then major telecoms vendor was there and demanded to know if http was an ISO standard. Tim Berners-Lee of course said "no" in the rather obvious and dismissive tone.
That C-level then stood up and angrily said "well, in that case I am most definitely not interested!" and stormed out. Considering that 2/3rds of the people there either worked for him (or as grad students, wanted to) the audience became quite small, and that major vendor became wilfully obstinate as a matter of policy. It blocked http access for its employees. It ignored the impact and the potential for the rest of the decade until that C was fired along with nearly all the staff that attended and left that seminar. It remains a hollow shell.
TBL indeed considered HTTP an open standards based response to the atrocious and restrictive Gopher protocol. He did what so many people at CERN do, when confronted with a restrictive inferior particle annihilate it with the biggest blast possible. As a consequence he also destroyed several companies who were so intent on comfortably fighting their well ordered 100 year war that they refused to even consider a sliver of change.
Michael Slavitch Ottawa Ontario Canada -----Original Message----- From: David Farber <dave () farber net> Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:45:51 To: ip<ip () v2 listbox com> Subject: [IP] Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet Begin forwarded message: From: Robert Alberti <alberti () sanction net> Date: August 19, 2008 9:34:17 AM EDT To: Jim Thompson <jim () netgate com>, dave () farber net Cc: Steve Goldstein <steve.goldstein () cox net>, DeWayne Townsend <d-town () tc umn edu
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet Reply-To: alberti () sanction net Gopher provided access to the first search engines, and the first abstraction of Internet content away from the machines upon which data was stored. In other words, Gopher was the first system that allowed you to search for things on the Internet before you actually knew where they were. You didn't have to know the address of anything in advance of using a Gopher client. It can be argued that this accelerated the rate at which subsequent tools such as Mosaic were developed. While I don't have records here in front of me, Gopher traffic across the NSF backbone was not surpassed by HTML traffic across that backbone until late 1993, early 1994 IIRC. Gopher was a bridging technology for the time when modem speeds (which was how many folks were connected) were at about 19,200 baud. The average Gopher directory was 1,500 bytes in length. The average HTML page with its images was 15,000 bytes at that time. At 19,200 baud and below, users did not accept multimedia pages (text and images) because transmissions speeds were too low. When modem speeds jumped to 56K baud, HTML popularity increased because it was now feasible to get a mixed-media page delivered in a timely fashion. Gopher introduced (and suffered for so doing) the concept of software licensing to the Internet. Nowadays the Internet is SO commercialized that it can be hard to remember that in 1993 most domain names ended in .EDU or .MIL. Domain names that ended in .COM were considered crass. Commercial use of the Internet was anathema to many, who insisted that since it was developed with public resources it should always be free and open. However, supporting Gopher was quickly consuming all of the resources of the tiny University of Minnesota department to which I and my colleagues belonged. It was our (undoubtedly clumsily handled) suggestion that Gopher software be commercially licensed that caused many of its users to abandon Gopher for the Web, which was in any case growing quickly in popularity. Finally, during the brief Gopher era, our team was visited by exactly ONE sitting U.S. Senator, a man who has been unfairly derided in political circles under the completely false accusation that he claimed to have invented the Internet. In 1991, while his present detractors were then attempting to make the jump from rotary to touch tone dialing, Senator Al Gore visited the Gopher developers as part of his work on the US High Performance Computing Act. Some interesting links: http://prentissriddle.com/trips/gophercon1993.html http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/85/28382/01278848.pdf ?arnumber=1278848 http://www.well.com/gopher/matrix/internet/hobbes.internet.timeline -Bob Alberti RFC 1436 On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 01:22 -1000, Jim Thompson wrote:
On Aug 19, 2008, at 1:02 AM, David Farber wrote:Also the word "gopher" appears nowhere in the timeline, although for a couple of years it WAS the Internet...No, it wasn't. I can get behind the idea that email was the Internet for a number of years. But while gopher and WAIS were popular for a brief period of time before NCSA shipped Mosaic and supported the IMG tag in HTML over HTTP, they were never responsible for anywhere near as much communication as email, to say nothing of things like USENET / NNTP. Jim
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Current thread:
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet, (continued)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
- Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet David Farber (Aug 19)
(Thread continues...)