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

Mon Mar 12 12:52:45 PDT 2018

I am with Brian on this. Maybe you should contact Larry Smarr? he headed
NCSA at the time.
Of course the 20-20 back vision may prove to be a distorted view of
history.

I will see Larry in the next month or so but sounds like you'd like a more
immediate response?

v

On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 3:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
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