[ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that developed Mosaic & HTTPd?

[Jack Haverty]

Good point, but I'd make a stronger distinction.  TBL's vision, and the
implementation, was of a collaborative mechanism, where all the members
of the web would both produce and consume information - "authoring" and
"reading" in a collaborative environment of geographically dispersed
colleagues.  The protocol had both "GET" and "PUT" primitives.

When I first encountered the CERN code sometime in 1991 or so, I
downloaded it and got it running.  My immediate reaction was "Wow.
Finally someone has come up with the next 'killer app'."  The "network
community" had been trying to go beyond the classic workhorses of
Telnet/FTP/Mail for 20 years, but the innovation that has endured came
from the "user community" of physicists.

But when the idea migrated elsewhere, starting probably with Mosaic, it
somehow lost the "producer" focus and became a mechanism primarily for
consuming material that was prepared in some 'offline' manner.

That has changed somewhat over time, but the focus still seems to be
consumption, not production -- browsing, rather than collaboration.
There are collaborative mechanisms (I personally like Mediawiki), but
IMHO the dominant usage is still consumption.   Production seems to have
moved to social media, where the structure of the collaboration is set
by the corporations rather than the users.

/Jack Haverty


On 03/11/2018 01:37 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
>  Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote 
>  a message of 25 lines which said:
> 
>> Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
> 
> It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
> he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
> not just a reading one).
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