[ih] The web as wind and whirlwind? (was Re: History from 1960s to 2025)

[Jack Haverty]

Before search engines, in the very early days of the WWW, a few 
"bookmark sites" were on the Web.   They simply listed a bunch of sites 
with hotlinks to each, enumerating whatever the site's author considered 
interesting to some audience.

I created one of these myself, for use within Oracle's internal network, 
for two purposes -- to provide a list of resources that company staff 
might find interesting or useful, and to educate them about the 
technology, which seemed to me to be the "killer app" that people had 
been seeking since the early days of the ARPANET.  Telnet, FTP, and 
email were useful, but there had to be something else.   Lots of 
candidates appeared over the years (archie, wais, gopher, ...) but none 
of them reached critical mass

But the "first search engine that mattered" to me was Yahoo.  Someone in 
Silicon Valley had told me that YAHOO was an acronym for Yet Another 
Hierarchical Officious Organizer, which seemed pretty accurate.  It 
"organized" the neonatal Web.   I remember bringing up the main yahoo 
page and then using the browser's "find" command to search for the 
specific site I was trying to find.

Yahoo IIRC didn't have a search engine function, but it was a useful 
Organizer that could be searched.

/Jack


On 12/20/25 12:28, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
>> Do you feel the creation of Archie, first search engine in 1990, 
>> helped, or was necessary for,  the success of the World Wide Web?
>
> Archie, WAIS and gopher were all invented at the same time as the web, 
> +- a year or so. So I think a wide-area information system of some 
> kind was quite inevitable, but Tim's stateless single-ended model that 
> didn't need any overall management was just better placed for 
> Darwinian success.
>
> For me the first search engine that mattered was AltaVista.
>
> RFC 1862 documents what people thought in 1994, and doesn't even 
> mention Archie.
>
> Regards/Ngā mihi
>    Brian Carpenter
>
> On 21-Dec-25 08:47, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote:
>>   Not sure which thread to put this under, the web or the timeline.
>> I haven't read Tim Berners-Lee's new book yet  either but I went to a 
>> talk at a local bookstore advertising the book (book came with price 
>> of admission).  He was there and was having a discussion with Thomas 
>> Friedman. At the last minute, the organizers said people could email 
>> in questions with no guarantee that any questions would be asked.  I 
>> sent in more than my fair share and the last question in the talk was 
>> one of my questions.  The question below wasn't addressed. I thought 
>> I would throw this out to the mailing list in case anyone wants to 
>> chime in.
>>
>> Do you feel the creation of Archie, first search engine in 1990, 
>> helped, or was necessary for,  the success of the World Wide Web?
>> barbara
>>      On Thursday, December 18, 2025 at 10:30:26 PM PST, Brian E 
>> Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>     On 19-Dec-25 17:44, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>>> On 12/18/2025 6:52 AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history wrote:
>>>> 1. The introduction of URLs/URIs made the identity of a site (the host
>>>> part of an http URL) really important and encouraged the
>>>> identification with trademarks.
>>>
>>> My impression was that, since the issue is with domain names' 
>>> ability to
>>> have real-world semantic, the trademark concern surfaces with /any/ use
>>> of domain names.  The web certainly exacerbated concerns, but it didn't
>>> create them.
>>>
>>>
>>> On 12/18/2025 12:16 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
>>>> Here's a counterfactual question: what would have happened if the
>>>> whole Clinton/Gore/Magaziner commercialization project had never
>>>> taken place?
>>>
>>> Commercial use of the Internet was already a serious issue by the late
>>> 1980s.  Before the Web was invented.
>>>
>>> NSFNet had funding but was still ramping up.  So, again, the NSFNet,
>>> etc. effort pushed growth, and it pushed some organizational and
>>> operational choices, but I do not believe it created the inevitability
>>> of a commercial Internet.(*)
>>>
>>> So, no, I think ISDN was not the likely alternative.  More likely was a
>>> version of the Internet, albeit with less operational and/or
>>> administrative flexibility.
>>
>> Yes, it's important to recall that when TimBL invented HTTP, he
>> could perfectly well have decided to implement it over OSI (we had
>> enough OSI running at CERN for that to have been technically plausible)
>> but he chose TCP/IP precisely because of the Internet** (including the
>> Cornell-CERN link that meant we were directly peering with NSFnet).
>> TCP/IP had already won before the web and long before Magaziner.
>>
>> ** I haven't yet read his new book, but he said that explicitly in
>> his 1999 book "Weaving the Web".
>>
>>      Brian
>>
>>
>>>
>>> d/
>>>
>>>
>>> (*) In the late 1980s, I was managing development efforts for TCP/IP 
>>> and
>>> OSI stacks on several platforms.  We went to a number of customers --
>>> mostly commercial organizations -- to find out their requirements for
>>> moving from TCP/IP to OSI.  Without exception they said they had no
>>> interest in that capability.  And, in fact, they were eager for
>>> transition tools from OSI to TCP/IP. Again, this was before the Web was
>>> invented.
>>>

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