[ih] deterioration of email (was Re: clever usc creation)

[John Levine]

According to Jack Haverty via Internet-history <jack at 3kitty.org>:
>As a result, courses in schools used TCP/IP as a vehicle for teaching 
>networking concepts, leading to a stream of graduates that already had 
>experience with the technology.  ...

Agreed.

>A similar process happened with the Web.  Open-source or free web 
>servers and browsers established a similar environment.   It was simpler 
>than other schemes.  First implementations were proprietary, but 
>eventually software became freely available, both in code and 
>specifications.  ...

Uh, what? Tim got CERN to give away his original software in 1993, UC
Berkeley gave away Viola, SLAC gave away Midas, and most importantly
NCSA gave away Mosaic and HTTPd.

>There were competitors.  Lotus Notes comes to mind.  
>Notes was pretty simple, but not free or open.

Lotus Notes was more a competitor to Usenet, with threads of
messages, but no hypertext I can recall.

The great missed opportunity was Gopher, which had interlinked sites
and limited media support and was much lighter weight than the web
so you could run servers on much smaller machines.  (I did.)  Then
some genius at the U of Minnesota tried to charge license fees for
it and that was that.

R's,
John
-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly