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

[John Levine]

It appears that Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> said:
>> 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.

In the first edition of Internet for Dummies, we had a chapters on all
the things you could do on the Internet, with the Web being one
chapter. In subsequent editions pretty much everything other than
telnet and email got absorbed into the web. Archie and WAIS were
great, but why use separate programs for eacn whcn you can embed them
into web sites and use one browser?

Gopher might have been a serious competitor if UofM hadn't made the
fatal mistake of trying to charge for it. It was a lot easier to set
up gopher sites than web sites, and it could do a lot of the
embedding.

R's,
John