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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 21-Dec-25 10:05, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> 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.

That's exactly what http://info.cern.ch was originally, in early 1991.
A home page for people at CERN to find mundane stuff like the phone
book. The reconstruction of info.cern.ch isn't quite what I remember
from the time that Tim came into my office in early 1991, checked that
I was logged in to the main Unix box, and told me to type "www".

The second web site was set up by Paul Kunz at SLAC in late 1991:
https://ahro.slac.stanford.edu/history-bits/slac-and-www

     Brian

> 
> 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.
>>>>
> 
>