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

Tue Dec 23 11:42:44 PST 2025

It appears that the NeXT browser in early 1991 did have image support, as I thought:

"With the NeXT browser, there were no images in-line with the text... Instead there would be a hypertext link that would open up another window with the image in it. That meant that you could keep the image on the screen whilst you scrolled through the text...".

[James Gillies & Robert Cailliau, How the Web was Born, OUP, 2000, p. 193]

"Thanks to the IMG tag that Marc Andressen had proposed in February 1993, Web site designers had the potential to make their Web sites look more like glossy magazines..."

[ibid., p. 252]

The Gillies/Cailliau book is very well researched and well indexed, when you want actual facts. And Robert's memory is still very clear.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 24-Dec-25 04:57, David Sitman via Internet-history wrote:
> Daniele's message below did not go through to the list, so he asked me to
> forward it.
> We listed Gopher before WWW in our guide because at the time (early 1993)
> we thought that it was more accessible to the academic and research
> community. And it was much easier to set up a Gopher instance than it was
> to create a Web site.
> Regarding graphics on the Web, my recollection, FWIW, is that Marc
> Andreessen was one of the main advocates of inline graphics, while Tim was
> reluctant at first, fearing that they would slow down rendering too much.
> 
> Happy holidays,
> David Sitman
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniele Bovio [mailto:Bovio at aol.com]
> Sent: Sunday, December 21, 2025 9:13 AM
> To: 'Brian E Carpenter' <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com>; 'Barbara Denny' <
> b_a_denny at yahoo.com>
> Cc: 'internet-history-bounces at elists.isoc.org' <
> internet-history-bounces at elists.isoc.org>
> Subject: RE: [ih] The web as wind and whirlwind? (was Re: History from
> 1960s to 2025)
> 
> Hi Brian,
> In 1993 the EARN team wrote and distributed the first Guide to Network
> Resource Tools, which in 1994 became RFC1580:
> 
> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1580
> 
> I think this document, however outdated, gives a good picture of the status
> of the internet at that time ;-)
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Daniele Bovio
> 
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 10:28 PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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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