[ih] Copy of first web page discovered

[Miles Fidelman]

Joe Abley wrote:
> On 2013-05-31, at 16:19, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What is rather sad, and typical of a major emerging problem, is
>> that the Wellington City Council web site only offers Council
>> minutes back to 2006, and my Google-foo has failed to find any
>> trace of material as ancient as 1990. No doubt they have the
>> minutes from 1890 and 1990 in their paper archives, but there is
>> a real problem with bit rot.
> I do remember Richard Naylor (back then, of WCC) telling me of their early efforts to publish bylaws and meeting minutes on a gopher server, something that Richard heard was used as an early example within Apple of how online services were important and could impact people in their daily lives.
>
> If you're interested in more details of the history it'd be well worth catching Richard the next time he's in Auckland, or seeking him out the next time you're in Wellington. Quite aside from this particular snippet, he has decades of anecdotes about connectivity in New Zealand and is hard to stop listening to.
>
>
It's actually pretty amazing how much early stuff got done with gopher.  
One of the very early information publishing services was gopher based 
(I'm spacing on the company and people, but they actually hosted our 
gopher for a while.  For those with better memories, it was the Internet 
services company that shared a building with O'Reilly, in Cambridge.)

In my days at the Center for Civic Networking, we hosted (to my 
knowledge) the first ever Federal rulemaking that involved Internet 
participation.  The FTC was drafting rules for consumer protection on 
on-line sales.  We (well Richard Civille in particular) convinced them 
that small businesses were the beneficiaries of online selling, but 
didn't have staff in DC watching rulemaking procedures.  We ended up 
taking every piece of paper submitted against that rule-making, running 
it through an OCR, and putting the files up on a gopher server - with 
about 24 hour turn-around.  The result was a lot more people had 
visibility into the process, a lot more comments came in (and from a lot 
of small businesses), and everyone seemed mostly happy with the 
resulting rules (i.e., they offered some real consumer protection while 
not being overly burdensome on small companies).

Miles Fidelman



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra