
Tim Berners-Lee's Original Announcement (1991) - peterb
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.announce/browse_thread/thread/6af5808c84a771fc/042c02b1b5992dd3?pli=1  
======
stroboskop
This turned out to be a historic announcement. Note that the release was in
source and binary form. The liberal copyright policy wisely chosen by Tim
Berners-Lee was an important reason for the WWW's success.

In contrast, this post again reminds me that the Usenet-archives are now owned
by Google. Are they also available anywhere else? Like the WWW they are part
of the world's cultural heritage. It's good that the archives are accessible,
but they shouldn't be proprietary.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Google owns the most extensive archives of usenet because it has put in the
effort. There's no reason that anyone else couldn't have done the same, they
just failed to do so. Google acquired dejanews, an old usenet archival site,
and they sought out personal archives as well to expand the collection. We
should be happy that they have done anything, the more likely outcome was for
no comprehensive archive ever to have been made.

~~~
zbowling
No, it's because they bought the company, Deja, that was responsible for
putting the first widespread web interface on Usenet. Google groups used to be
just Usenet until it forked into something different (user lists).
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News>

~~~
InclinedPlane
Did you read my post all the way through? I know they acquired dejanews, I
said it. But they also went to the effort to make use of deja's archive and to
keep it safe. More so, they sought out private usenet archives and integrated
them into their collection. Indeed, the very message that sparked this
discussion comes from the work that google did and not from the dejanews
archive since it dates to 1991, 4 years before deja began operations.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I disagree with this comment:

> We should be happy that they have done anything, the more likely outcome was
> for no comprehensive archive ever to have been made.

I think that's not the case, I think the existence of Google Groups is
regarded as "good enough" by groups that might otherwise be doing archiving
(Internet Archive, for one). That Groups started out with good intentions
isn't surprising, but it has evolved into something completely different. If
the intent was to archive an important part of the history of the internet,
viewing posts wouldn't be behind a login-wall.

~~~
timothya
It isn't behind a login wall. If you saw a login screen when trying to access
the link, then you must be partially logged into Google in the first place.
Try the link in an incognito window and you'll see that no login is required.

------
InclinedPlane
21 years to go from science lab side-project to the foundation of many of the
largest multi-billion dollar companies in history and the glue to a worldwide
communication network right out of science fiction. What will the next 21
years bring?

~~~
pasbesoin
On the cautionary side, look at where many of those science labs are going --
in the U.S., for example. Increasingly dependent upon corporate funding and
so, more or less, under the corporate thumb.

I'm not saying it's inevitable, but it's a warning sign for the Net, as well.

------
zbowling

      > However, it could start a revolution in information access.
    

They had no idea.

~~~
jballanc
Reminds me of "the most famous understatement in history" from the original
Watson & Crick paper:

    
    
        > It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing
          we have postulated immediately suggests a possible
          copying mechanism for the genetic material.

~~~
Create
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/photo51/>

They were literally jerks. Franklin's work hasn't escaped them either. He
isn't even denying the misappropriation, after all, that is what a physicist
does by his definition (take other people's data ...work):

<http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1380325>

just for the record and to please the prospective downvoting mob, here are my
experimental observations consistent with the cern experimental domain in
order to warn any non-westerners:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices
in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value
of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 <http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264>

Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines.
What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he
got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where
the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was quite
graphical programming, and not world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive
toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around --
certainly not western equivalents.

Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it
work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. world-wide. Nobody was
astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing
special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic.
They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given
away without charge. WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free
of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and
the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some
companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of.

CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of
innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by
Veltman if you feel to downvote this because of CERN.

~~~
scrumper
Are you a Markov chain? The state of the art has advanced a long way if so.
Nevertheless I don't understand the point you're trying to make, except that
you seem to doubt that what Tim Berners-Lee (not 'Berner') did was actually
innovative.

Important innovation often comes from someone making a trivial-seeming
connection between two existant but separate concepts. For better or worse,
the person who makes the minor leap often gets the major credit, with little
acknowledgement for those who did all the groundwork on the separate bits (but
lacked the spark to join them together.) It's the creation of something novel
- the linkage - that's innovative. It can be obvious in hindsight; it usually
is, in fact, but it takes a certain brain to see the connection in the first
place.

The world needs people who can contribute flashes of novelty, just as it needs
people willing to toil for years refining, strengthening and otherwise
enhancing the foundations that those flashes can dance across. In their lives,
people do both all the time to various degrees. A very few, like TBL, start
something truly enormous through accident of circumstance.

In 1991, hypertext wasn't new, the internet wasn't new, and network file
servers weren't new; but the combination of the three to create a user-
navigable web of documents independent of the underlying network was most
assuredly new. In such leaps and connections the world advances.

~~~
Create
I stick to my guns and do my best to warn others

"NARRATOR: Sir John Maddox, later editor of Nature for two decades, shows how
Franklin's contribution was obscured by Watson and Crick with a single guarded
sentence.

SIR JOHN MADDOX: They say, "We have been stimulated by a general knowledge of
her work." But in fact, they had particular knowledge of her work. And I, as
an editor, would have smelled a rat at that."

------
aj700
I take nothing away from what he did and I'm one of those people who dislike
it when some people belittle what he did. He did the browser and the protocol
and the url scheme. The excellence of NeXTSTEP helped. I only recently learned
that a lot of the design of html, in terms of deciding how to fit sgml to
markup the "Web" was also Dave Raggett. So people who say TBL "copied" SGML
are wrong in two ways. There was also Calliau. Then all the other html "tags"
that came afterwards, with NSCA Mosaic and Netscape and then W3C additions.
Andreessen famously suggesting img etc. But TBL joined html with what else it
needed to take over.

------
chimeracoder
I haven't seen anyone link to it yet, so here is that first server (magnet
link): <https://gist.github.com/3404362>

There was a Reddit effort to recover it some months back, as it was believed
to be lost. (It's now on the w3.org page, but IIRC, either it wasn't then, or
it's a slightly later version published there).

[http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/q4e57/help_save_the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/q4e57/help_save_the_worlds_first_webserver_we_need_to/)

~~~
deno
Link to a link? :)

    
    
        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:30cf16d23446f98217c67b3b8840fbdb21ba1c9e

~~~
chimeracoder
Haha, thanks for the catch - I just copied that directly from a tweet. I
couldn't tweet a magnet link (too long, and not supported by bit.ly) - hence
the gist.

Anyway, please feel free to download this piece of history!

------
jgeralnik

      However, it could start a revolution in information access
    

I'll say...

------
eclipxe
Today's version:

Show HN: My weekend project, WorldWideWeb (5 days from funding, Kickstarter
details in comments!)

------
flashmob
Actually, the earliest mention is here:
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6487%40cernvax.cern.ch>

Other famous usenet posts:
<http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html>

~~~
fl3tch
You know what's interesting? The immediate follow up to that first message, by
Richard Chimera, mentions Randy Pausch. Does anybody remember him?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo>

Small world.

------
Zarathust
I just read that and thought "meh...". I wonder how many such invention I pass
everyday

~~~
27182818284
In all fairness it was meh at its release. It didn't even support images.

------
nixarn
But it was on August 6? Right?

------
ta12121
OK, but why? I mean, who here hasn't seen this or know about it?

~~~
smokestack
Yesterday was its 11th anniversary if for no other reason.

------
nsxwolf
The Web is now old enough to drink! Let's buy the Web a drink.

