"What happens in an Internet Minute in 2020, for example:
- Zoom hosts 208,333 meetings
- There are 404,444 Netflix user streams
- YouTube users upload 500 hours of video
- Consumers spend $1,000,000 online
- 1,388,889 people make video/voice calls"
Mind blowing if you think about it. I really want to focus on the positives of WWW in this thread. I, like million others, am making a living out of WWW and that itself is so amazing. Thank you Tim Berners-Lee and everyone else who made this happen. A remarkable Invention for the human kind.
I'd be curious to know how many combined page loads there are for PornHub (and cousins) per minute. It's just as much a part of what the web is today as any of the services listed above.
These are all eye popping numbers. Somehow the YouTube number is scarier than others. With that much content, how is anyone supposed to find what they are interested in? No wonder YouTube’s algorithm is so bad. Even google can’t do a good job of search and recommendation at YouTube
Amusing anecdote: The computer that hosted the original WWW is in a little museum at CERN, open to the public. When my family saw it several years ago, it still had a hand written note taped to the side of it, something to the effect of "Please don't turn this computer off."
It still amuses me to think that at one point, the entire WWW depended on someone remembering to not shut it down.
Edit: See below. Reality is much more accurate than my memory. ;-)
It said "This machine is a server". Isn't that still true for any server ? I mean if you power off a server, it stops serving. I guess the what makes that note truly unique is that it was THE only server at that time ?
I guess it just means "even though this machine looks like a desktop computer (which it very much usually was as a NeXT station), it's actually acting as a server, so please don't shut it down like you would with a desktop machine".
It by far wasn't the only "server" at that time. The WWW may be 30 years old, but the Internet is much older.
> still had a hand written note taped to the side of it, something to the effect of "Please don't turn this computer off."
You sound like "nobody has cleaned this piece of paper off [yet]" or "will be cleaned of soon". But it is the central piece of the exhibit, very intentionally. Probably written by TBL himself and illustrating a feature of the new invention: "The internet is always on"
And I heard of this before, that TBL developed the WWW on a (NEXT-)workstation, which also was the first www-server with a sticker on it that said "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!" (https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:This_Machine_is_a_...)
It makes me feel strange to think that all these industries, all these jobs, and all these companies didn't exist just 30 years ago. Nowadays everyone says the web. It seems very hard to predict what technology will be dominant in another 30 years. It is fortunate that I will probably still live by then to witness the future.
> It seems very hard to predict what technology will be dominant in another 30 years
The web seems to have bootstrapped entire industries who rely on its infra to operate. This will be the same story in the next 20 years. The web is the foundation, the innovation you will see, will piggyback on top of it, unless something else serves as the underlying basis (cough blockchain).
I’m more impressed that the first smartphone is only 14 years old and it has changed so much to our lives:
- First, it developed the usage of superficial socialization (lifestyle show-off, body photos, up to lewd behaviors or prostitution, depression for a lot of people, massive societal dopamine addiction),
- Second, Youtube was the world wild web of all politics and militant movements,
- We’re in a third phase where most of it is under control, not tight but clearly guided, with many people doubting the accuracy of both sides. The phase of defiance.
3 phases (in my opinion) in just a few years, each of them responsible for negative societal shifts (from democratized prostitution to the invasion of Congress), and also positive ones (tech progress, political progress too, to be honest). Who knows what’s next?
It's sad you reduced smartphones to their negatives. I did distance myself from social media but here are things I frequently use my smartphone for:
- Long distance calls with Skype. It is possible to do a cheap long distance call in a foreign country by just buying some data credit. People can still reach you through your Skype number. Not possible with a feature phone.
- Browsing the internet while shopping. Sometimes I find a product that I'm suspicious of its quality. I just do a quick Google search. It's possible to do that with a more advanced feature phone but a smartphone usually have more screen estate.
- GPS/Maps. Big one for people living in big cities or while traveling.
- Payments, notes, quick photos, recording some calls, emails, etc...
There are more to smartphones than social revolutions, though I'm sure it played a certain role in shaping the opinion of people and transmitting the news.
And smartphones are out of reach for most governments, and only an AI powered thing can control it (there is just too many users to read all their messages) which won't likely work in the short-term/present or will be irrelevant in the future.
With the further democratization of tech, I wouldn't worry much about control. The area where government have the most control is currency and tariffs (control import/export goods). If they failed to curb crypto-currencies, they have little chance with texts/news.
That comparison - the smartphone being 14 and the web being 30 really illustrates what a total warp jump it has all been.
15 years from boxy home computers connected to each other, to glowing high resolution pocket computer slabs. And then 15 years from those slabs being something totally new and revolutionary, to literally 50%* of all humans having them on their person at all times.
The acceleration has definitely come with a lot of turbulence. If this acceleration is exponential, then what's next is a whole lot more turbulence.
(Edit:*originally wrote 80% - I thought it would be higher at this point!)
I think smartphones might be a bit older than that. I remember using some phones in 2003 that already had a basic internet connection (wap), camera, and on which you could check your emails. The first versions of a blackberry that could do emails was 1999 I think. And PalmPilots in 1997. The iphone was just a cooler and more powerful toy.
The Wap, or even the Blackberry, didn’t have an impact on society. It just enabled a few more usecases for the owner but not for the group - like carrying your work with you. The iPhone 2007, and moreso in 2010, was an entire leap forward: It enabled dozens of usecases at a time, such as using Maps, online dating with photos and geographical distance, writing reviews of restaurants… and it triggered efforts in the dumbification of UI, which meant it went widespread like wildfire, which was the condition sine qua none for social media to become relevant. None of that would have been possible with the Blackberry, its wrong commercialization tactics and its 52 buttons.
Yeah, it's a bit like mobile phone didn't have an impact while it was radio phone or during the first years of modern-ish mobile networks; it was de facto reserved for specific professional use and the happy few. It took 10 years or more to expand the networks coverage and drop prices, and then only it had a very noticeable public impact.
Blackberry and Treo from the early 2000s certainly gave you "easy to access" email and some limited browsing. The iPhone by the late 2000s though was a very different experience. There was definitely a gen 1 of smartphones and then a gen 2 ushered in by the iPhone.
That’s certainly true. But you can say the same of early 1990s www. My point is that the idea of having a multifunction tool in your pocket that could connect to the internet came as early as it was technically possible, long before Apple released the iphone.
I don’t believe democratized prostitution is a negative thing. If anything countries like the US would have far fewer criminals and desperate incels if we just legalized it.
I wonder about correlation vs causation. Before the internet existed, many people recognized that America was a declining empire. Advisors to presidents recommended bad courses of action - like aligning ourselves with the rising empire of China - which have only accelerated the decline. The internet is the reflecting pool that shows us what our age of decadence / Weimar republic / kali yuga looks like.
Allow me to offer an opposing anecdote: smartphone means fuck all to me. It changed nearly nothing in my life. Most of the time I don't even know where my smartphone is (except for car navigation).
Do people really consider smartphones "more impressive" / impactful than the World Wide Web?
> smartphone means fuck all to me. It changed nearly nothing in my life.
Sure, that's the same to me, I don't even own one. But that's not how the majority feels and acts. And there's been another acceleration in the last 2-3 years, where more business and, worse, official administrative stuff is pushed on the smartphone (as mobile-first).
One fresh anecdote. 2 hours ago, I watched the news, and the presenter was explaining how you didn't actually need to have you Covid Pass on your mobile: "you can have it on paper, on a sheet you know, and then er... you fold it and put it in your pocket, er... like we used to do in ancient times."
"Like we used to do in ancient times", she said. And she felt the need to explain how to carry a stupid paper... (she was that close to tell people how many times they should fold it, and how to unfold it.) At home, we were like WTF? For many people, doing everything and the rest on the smartphone has become not only normal, but the primary way of doing, and the only way of doing they know. Other ways are already being marginalised.
That computers don't seem to be correlated with productivity improvements is a thing. And also despite the huge valuations of tech companies, their secondary effects on the economy appear to become negative quickly.
That's very much unlike for instance GM in the 1950's. Where GM had a huge valuation. And spawned secondary businesses that themselves had large collective valuations.
> First, it developed the usage of superficial socialization (lifestyle show-off, body photos, up to lewd behaviors or prostitution, depression for a lot of people, massive societal dopamine addiction),
No, the smartphone did not do that. All it did was amplify some of those aspects of human nature, making them even easier to project; aspects which were already prevalent across essentially all cultures throughout history.
Tabloids, newspapers, magazines, television, radio, photography, automobiles, physical mail, audio recording, the Internet & PCs, books, scrolls, tribal story telling, and on it goes. The smartphone is merely the latest amplifier.
Lifestyle showoff? There has never been a time in which people didn't commonly do that. There will never be a time in which people don't commonly do that. It's a core, fundamental system of human evolution and social structure. It's a competition. Humans never stop competing for survival, competing for position in the pecking order of society, competing to get the best mates, and so on. Very high levels of social superficiality did not begin with the smartphone, it has always been there.
Body photos? Since the first photographs. Drawing & painting eachother before that.
The ancient Romans and Greeks were hyper social, gossiping cats. They could be superficial as all hell. The same was true of the colonial generations in Europe. So were all people throughout all of history and without exception, to the extent they weren't busy trying not to die of deprivation.
The smartphone didn't fundamentally change anything. It amplified, and in some cases simplified, what we were already doing.
General observation: this is the most brilliant invention of my lifetime, and has realized the information revolution, enabled countless humans to teach themselves and each other, and shown us a myriad of truths about ourselves.
> Our vision is for a World Wide Web that is more inclusive, and more respectful of its users: a Web that supports truth better than falsehood, people more than profits, humanity rather than hate.
I support the principles, but I can't give the real implementation a passing grade.
It's popular for liberals to say things like "truth better than falsehood" but they really mean that they want to be able to control what other people read. Only half of what they think is true at a given time actually is.
The other half of the equation is that the more well monied get their message out better than the unmonied. You can't use technology to fix that. Most of the conspiracies we deplore are advanced by idiots with money.
> It's popular for liberals to say things like "truth better than falsehood" but they really mean that they want to be able to control what other people read.
Can you conceive of a world, or even just one person, who could say "truth better than falsehood" and actually mean it?
> The other half of the equation is that the more well monied get their message out better than the unmonied.
There's a mixed record on this, really. Yes, massive but subtle spending can result in deep and wide dispersion of a "message". But then there's Rebecca Black and "Friday", too.
A guy I went to college with was there for the birth of the web. I remember him coming back that Fall, and him showing me, on one of our campus NeXTs, this new "World Wide Web" thing. "Cool, I guess. It's like Hypercard," I said, "but not as capable — but it is networked...so how is this better than Gopher? What's the use case?" "Just wait," he replied, "you can't build on Gopher like you can on this." Times changed quickly.
>our campus NeXTs, this new "World Wide Web" thing
Similar story. My lab had 2 NeXT cubes (the monochrome version) and the first time I saw a graphical browser was eye-opening. I had only experienced telnet and gopher before that...
I think this was probably '92-93 - like 3 years before Windows 95 even existed. This experience is what pushed me headlong into the nascent Linux, as the idea of going from NeXT to Windows 95 was like moving from a Ferrari to a tricycle. Linux was no Ferrari but it was at least a pickup truck....
Does anyone know if there is a URL for Tim Berners-Lee's book "Weaving the Web", where it is accessible over HTTP? Not even talking about gratis open access, just whether or not the Web-of-documents vision is actually in practice for TimBL's book itself. Also not talking about a link to a storefront that sells it, or a promo site, or a faithfully reproduced but non-canonical link to a warez'd copy. Specifically asking here whether the book has a URL. This seems like a pretty basic OKR for grading progress of the Web vision, and yet it seems reasonable to think the answer is "no", which is incredibly ironic (but not shocking).
It was surprising just now to find that there is not even a preview on Google Books, nor are you allowed to search inside it.
Correcting for the intention: yes, books are easy to identify! <https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-formal/isbn> You also want to able to dereference. I edited my DOM copy of your comment to add the hyperlink <a href="urn:isbn:9780062515872"> to the book's name, then clicked it. Firefox prompted me to pick a local executable. ISTR Netscape used to handle this a bit more gracefully. It is perfectly okay that not every UA implements every conceivable scheme, the particularities of the failure do not diminish the idea of the Web.
I happen to know archivists and librarians. They use specialised information systems that are not part of the Web. There does not seem to be an urgent need to uplift the legacy.
IMO the grade is not "no", but "the foundations are there ready to be built upon".
That's very obviously not a URL for the book. That's a URL for a promo site, i.e., one of the things explicitly listed as something not to reply with, since it's not an answer to the question being asked.
"Specifically asking here whether the book has a URL."
(Being a promo site, it is a place where we should expect the URL to be linked to, if it existed, but there is no such URL to be found on that page, hence the question...)
It's almost as if no one who buys that book and is in the middle of reading it but forgets it on their desk one day is going to say, "I know, I'll visit https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/ and pick up reading where I left off."
No matter how many inane replies you write (calling other people obtuse), it's not going to change the fact that you ignored the request and went ahead and posted a link to a marketing page, anyway. (As if, had it been the case that someone were actually looking for that page, they wouldn't have been able to find it in 5 seconds just like you did.) One can only imagine that you're the kind of person who spends their days reading half the words in an email, support ticket, or StackOverflow question, comprehending none of what the actual message is but convincing yourself you've got a handle on it, and then closing them by the dozen with some non-resolution while exclaiming "SOLVED!" and patting yourself on the back at the end of the day for a job well done.
It's great that the web is so durable and long-lived, but I wonder about the health of it - it's got so complicated that we're down to only three implementations (Firefox, Chromium, WebKit), no realistic possibility of a new engine emerging, and essentially one implementation defining the standard. I wonder where we'll be in another 30 years?
The growing complexity for the past decade has been driven almost entirely by Google. I'm now pretty convinced they did it as a part of an explicit strategy.
It's so insidious - on the one hand they are improving the web, on the other hand, the complexity they are driving makes the web more vulnerable.
It's always like this until the next new thing. The big guys will control everything until something new comes around that they don't want to implement. It will be a bit harder because you have the Web Browser which is a lot flexible than the old AOL Clients. Also WebKit is available publicly for any one to fork and create a new service.
When modems were available for residential use, BBSes were the gateway and slowly were killed by the big guys (AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy) but what these big guys refused to do is work together to allow further communications with people outside of their networks.
It took kids coming out of college and wanting to keep their internet access for email, ftp, talk, usenet, gopher and http. They started to partner with universities and offer TCP/IP (over PPP) access for $20. Local BBS started to open gateways to allow it's users to send/receive SMTP emails. By the time the big guys realized they were at a disadvantage, they started to offer communications between AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy, At first charging their users extra fees, some plans made it like SMS and were charging per message. Eventually users where just using their clients to get to the internet and that service dies. Most of those small internet providers were purchased by bigger companies.
What will need to change now to kick the big guys (Verizon, Google, Apple, etc...) in the balls again? The tech is so regulated that I doubt we will see anything new as far and networking. In NYC WiMax was hobbled by the communication companies like Verizon TimeWarner and RCN.
If you were around at the beginning of the boom and had an AOL, Juno, or Prodigy account; eventually gave NetZero a try; watched Hackers and even The Net, know what a .nfo file is, marveled at Napster; collected Winamp skins; signed up to have DVDs delivered to your mailbox; and when Internet, Information super-highway, World Wide Web, and cyberspace were used interchangeably, you’re one of the lucky ones. I love the Internet for all it is now, but man do I miss the wonder it instilled in its nascency.
- Computers… and even that could be split between the database era (1980), the web era (2000), and the AI era (2030?).
For each cycle, it starts like wild competition, and ends with installed actors. Who would think of being the small guy who topples Ford by reinventing automobile today? No-one.
There is no going back: Automobile has no “meaning”, just usages. All of this just makes society go faster. The only meaning in life is participating to the economy, family, and raising people from poverty.
Computers: scientific computing era (1950), business computing era (1960), personal computing era (1980), web era (1995), mobile computing era (2005), social networking era (2010), ML/AI era (2020)
I clearly remember when I first saw the www, a few years into its life, at a meeting in the Mac users group my dad was a part of, probably at a university department or similar that had internet access.
I thought it was one of the dullest things I'd ever seen anyone do with a computer, and I didn't at all understand what was so interesting about this Netscape programme. I must have been about ten.
I did grow to find it exciting for a few a years, my misspent youth on instant messenger and bulletin boards, learning, flamewars and a few friendships that last to this days... but as I approach 40 and the damn thing has both turned into my full-time job, and become corporate shadow of its old self, something out of a bad old depressing cyperpunk novel, I do sometimes think my initial reaction was closer to the right one.
I remember one of the first things I wanted to actually see on the web was the Orbitz (drink) website (96/97?), although I remember seeing yahoo ~two years before in elementary school.
To me the internet means an access to information not seen by previous generations. I’ve learned a lot of backyard mechanics from my dad. But I have since gone on to achieve a lot more in that field by having access to YouTube or other forums where I can find detailed instructions on how to fix things. I think about hacking my Xbox 360 and jailbreaking my first iPhone when I realized the jailbroken phones could video record and stock iPhones could not. I met my first wife online. I was there in the beginning when pictures would slowly load from the top down because speeds were just that slow. The stuff you can do now over the internet is beyond imagination from a couple decades ago.
I remember the first time someone fired up Mosaic on a Sun workstation at work. At first the only pages were alma mater pages because no one had an IT department that knew how to set up a webserver yet. It didn't really dawn on me until people started putting up lyric pages for bands, and the speed at which you could access the data via links. I had been using FTP (and archie and gopher) up to that point, which involved a lot of typing and taking notes, and hyperlinks/bookmarks were light-years easier. That was the lightbulb for me.
I was looking for an old video of Tom Brokaw interviewing Gates and Schmidt, and found this. For a little laugh and innocent nostalgia: Flashback! The Internet In 1995
Imagine that the early purpose was just to allow physicists working in big collaboration to work together from different places and handle data more easily. Who could guess that any of that will happen as a byproduct.
Yeah congrats to TBL and his baby. Actually, I believe the date is slightly off, and it should be August, 6th, according to the fist website [1], and in particular [2] linked from there.
But I've got to ask what has W3C done lately? I mean JavaScript and CSS is not their fault, but looking at W3C's accomplishments, they were busy with XML and WS-* (SOAP), then RDF/Sparql, and whatnot most of the time, creating a cottage industry of "enterprise" standards but completely loosing relevance on the web. Meanwhile, HTML stagnated, and CSS had to become the way overcomplicated beast it is today to make up for HTML's shortcomings, HTML still mostly being the casual academic publishing markup language it always was.
The result is the monopolistic browser landscape we have today and web authoring becoming unapproachable for all but an entrenched profession of "web developers" when the web was primarily a medium for easy self-publishing. Soon, Google implanted itself as the middle man, when getting rid of publishers and closed networks was the whole point of the web in the first place. Meanwhile, W3C continues to take money for driving CSS complexity ad absurdum (though they have talented people on the CSS WG for sure) and drops requirements for at least two interworking implementations for their XML stuff (such as XSLT). Basically, W3C is acting like a self-serving, pay-as-you org for advertising stuff as "standard". W3C's HTML 5 and SVG efforts have effectively stopped about three years ago.
Today, almost nobody is inspired to make websites; even developers flock to github and other centralized services for their stuff.
As much as I believe TBL acted in good faith, I think W3C as a standardization organization failed on all accounts that you could reasonably expect from a standardization effort.
The WWW was pretty great at age 10, but took a wrong turn in its teen years.
We now do signal amplification of the worst of humanity. The giants are walled gardens, and in another 10-15 years the "web" will be subsumed by Facebook, and Google's "Cromification/AMPlification" (content lives on their servers and there is no URL bar.)
We've destroyed much of the quirkiness and novelty.
Now instead of sharing content and news p2p, it flows from centralized behemoths that choose for us. RIP personal websites, RSS, IRC, and bittorrent. They still exist, just as shells of their former lives. Their promise sucked away.
It's not like the rest of tech fared much better. You can't even run your own software on half of the devices out there now. Or replace their batteries. Or trust them not to spy on you.
I would focus on the overall positives at least in this thread. Yes there are lot of valid criticisms but that is more on the companies and not WWW in itself. WWW is Free, Open and you can do anything you want with it even today. You mention personal websites. No one is stopping you from getting a cheap server and setting up your personal website. In fact, I would argue it is has become easier to do that with so many cheap and reliable options (.e.g DigitalOcean, Vultr etc). I run my personal website using WordPress (another great invention) and I am free to host it however I want.
UMW in Fredricksburg, Virginia has a program called "Domain of One's Own" where you get set up with a personal site at a domain of your choosing, available to every student and everyone on staff.
> We've destroyed much of the quirkiness and novelty.
Yawn. People say this over and over again. It hasn't been destroyed. It's just not at the top of your search results.
Within the last week, HN's front page had a link to this little gem:
http://www.redwoodworld.co.uk/locations.htm
... a catalog of every (?) redwood tree in the British Isles, lovingly maintained and deliciously retro. How can you believe that the quirky and novel have been destroyed when sites like this (and there are millions more) are still out there?
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- Zoom hosts 208,333 meetings
- There are 404,444 Netflix user streams
- YouTube users upload 500 hours of video
- Consumers spend $1,000,000 online
- 1,388,889 people make video/voice calls"
Mind blowing if you think about it. I really want to focus on the positives of WWW in this thread. I, like million others, am making a living out of WWW and that itself is so amazing. Thank you Tim Berners-Lee and everyone else who made this happen. A remarkable Invention for the human kind.