Interesting People mailing list archives
re: Happy birthday dotcom as internet domain name turns 25
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:32:18 -0400
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dave CROCKER <dhc2 () dcrocker net> Date: March 15, 2010 3:56:21 PM EDT To: dave () farber netCc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>, Ole Jacobsen <ole () cisco com>, Bob Drzyzgula <bob () drzyzgula org> Subject: Re: [IP] re: Happy birthday dotcom as internet domain name turns 25Reply-To: dcrocker () bbiw net
On 3/15/2010 7:14 AM, Dave Farber wrote:I do wonder if journalistsgenerally have some contractual or ethical obligation to insert a minimum of one error or misrepresentation into everything they write: "Scholars generally agree that a turning point was the introduction of the Mosaic web browser by Netscape that brought mainstream consumers on to the web."The deeper error, in that part of the article, is the presumption that .com did not initially and clearly mean for-profit COmpany. From the start, it did, and .org was for non-for-profits. Companies like BBN, Digital Equipment and Xerox were on the net from its start. The fact that there were constraints on the types of use that were acceptable did not preclude participation by for-profit companies. Rather, it encouraged discerning the type.Also, although not quite phrased this broadly in the article, references to the Mosaic browser tend to credit it as the critical capability that ensured the success of the Internet. Mosaic was an enormous advance, but so were other achievements. The idea that Mosaic changed things, fundamentally, only works only if one ignores the long adoption curve and a number of milestones that preceded it.From its inception, the Arpanet/Internet followed a very steady growth curve and adoption at the time of Mosaic merely continued along that curve.What happened at the time of Mosaic was a change in public / perception/ of the net. Interestingly, I've heard that the definition of a "mass market" is a potential customer base of 2 million people and it was the year of Mosaic that was estimated to achieve an Internet user population of 2 million...In the late 1980s, I led an Internet software stack development group, where one-third of my customers were in Europe. Europe was the hotbed of the "preferred" and competing OSI work. Imagine the irony that one of my customers was the IT department at ISO, one of the two organizations that developed OSI. I asked the head of their IT about this and without any hesitation said that he was tasked with connecting his systems together and all that mattered was getting that job done and this was the only way he could do it.His rationale made clear the likely success of the Internet's technology.The Web was created in 1989 and had essentially no penetration by 1990. Rather, "gopher" was the popular publication mechanism, beginning to replace Anonymous FTP. In 1990 I was giving a class on the Internet and the students directed a series of choices for the gopher demonstration that led to our discovering the Wellington, New Zealand Town Council Minutes of the previous week.Seeing that a random, non-technical group thought it worth publishing such mundane material was the first time that I had no doubt just how complete and pervasive the success of the Internet would be.d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net
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