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

Sun Dec 21 11:51:56 PST 2025

Until the mid 95 or so, there was an NCSA list of websites. I recall
because I made a site for punk band the Bad Brains, and got in on there :)

Joly.

On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 5:45 PM Barbara Denny via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>
> I believe yahoo was trying to be a portal to the Internet at the point in
> time you are talking about.  You go to their website and from there you
> could find whatever you wanted (if it existed). This was before Apple had
> created a walled garden.
> barbara
>     On Saturday, December 20, 2025 at 01:05:25 PM PST, Jack Haverty via
> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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.
>
> 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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-- 
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Joly MacFie  +12185659365
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