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

[John Day]

My understanding (from afar) was that the ‘producers’ for Mosaic were the supercomputer apps that were generating lots of data and they needed a tool to facilitate managing it.  There was a need at NCSA for something like what Mosaic was.

> On Mar 11, 2018, at 19:02, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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