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

Sun Dec 21 14:25:27 PST 2025

By 1995, I believe the NCSA What’s New page had been transferred to O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator project. 

I know this because I was the GNN technical director at the time, and one of my jobs was to manage and publish the What’s New page. I had a little Perl script that automatically generated the static HTML files from a bunch of text files. (CGI existed, but was rarely used.)

And as someone who grew up in the late 80s DC punk scene, I was probably very excited to see your Bad Brains site come through. :)

—John

> On Dec 21, 2025, at 14:52, Joly MacFie via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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