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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 13/03/2018 05:05, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the oral 
> and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization & 
> players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.
> 
> I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates that 
> spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the workers.

The managers? Most of them had no idea. At CERN, Mike Sendall (Tim's
group leader) and David Williams (deputy division leader, later the
actual division leader) both stated later that their main contribution to
the web was not stopping the project, which was unfunded and unauthorised.
Somebody paid for a couple of NeXts but I'm pretty sure that was for
some other project. Please read the Gilles and Cailliau book for details.

The first server in the US was set up by Paul Kunz at SLAC. As far as I
know he did it because he wanted to, not because anybody approved it.
That was ceratinly Paul's style. I believe the second server in the US was
set up by David Martin at Fermilab. Ask him (he's at Argonne now, dem at alcf.anl.gov).

A management culture of not interfering with smart people was the key.
Classical skunk works.

> How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to 
> TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts that led to 
> the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual 
> subsumption by today's web.
> 
> A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal knowledge 
> of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less 
> visible.  IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPd, the 
> HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher, replaced by 
> something even newer and shinier. 

In 1992, Tim knew that a good browser was the key and he worked on stimulating
that. If it hadn't been Mosaic in late 1992, it would have been something else
in 1993, I think. Single-ended hyperlinks really provided a more powerful
paradigm than gopher, WAIS or Archie which were the main alternatives.

> Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the 
> web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."  I'd kind of 
> like to understand the environment in which that happened.

The Jim Clark book answers that. It's rather self-serving, but it was because
Jim was an experienced entrepreneur and ran into Andreesen that Netscape
became "industrial". NSCA management was a hindrance, not a help. They
didn't get out of the way.

> By analogy.  Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both at BBN, 
> and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.

I'm not sure the analogy holds. NCSA doesn't seem to have operated
as a skunk works, and they viewed networking as a form of plumbing.
I get the feeling that Mosaic was a bit of an outlier in their history;
NSFnet and bandwidth was the main story.

1997 interview with Larry Smarr: https://vimeo.com/6982439

    Brian

> We all know the story 
> of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.  The 
> environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various 
> personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late" and some 
> of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known about the 
> next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail systems for 
> various O/S environments.
> 
> Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA? (There's a 
> timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but it's all 
> kind of sketchy.)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Miles
> 
> 
> 
> On 3/10/18 8:38 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> I see that Marc did an oral history interview as early as 1995:
>> http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
>> He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about NCSA management.
>>
>> Also he was interviewed for this (as well as Vint):
>> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
>>
>> In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a whole lot.
>>
>> Regards
>>     Brian
>>
>> On 11/03/2018 13:51, Vint Cerf wrote:
>>> you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
>>> any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
>>> really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
>>> Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
>>> (and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
>>> 1994.
>>>
>>> vint
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Folks,
>>>>
>>>> I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
>>>> that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
>>>> chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
>>>>
>>>> I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
>>>> folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
>>>> time, so to speak.
>>>>
>>>> Any insights?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Miles Fidelman
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>>>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>>>>
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>