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

[Jack Haverty]

When I was at Oracle and first heard about the Web in the early 90s, I 
remember paying someone a nominal amount ($50?) for a software license, 
probably for a browser on a PC, to learn what this new Web thing was all 
about.  A bit later lots of free software became available, but very 
early on you had to buy it or build your own.

We then created a linkage between Oracle databases and browsers using 
the CGI API of the early web servers.  Even got a patent for it, 
primarily for defensive use.  Then we taught customers how to use the 
Web as a client front-end instead of requiring clients to install 
proprietary client GUI software.  That made all sorts of things 
possible.  A popular tag line at the time was "Where do you want to go 
today?"  We created a variant -- "What do you want to DO today?"

Curiously, Licklider's connection appeared again.  Lick had left us, but 
his "chief of staff" was still at MIT and recruited Tim Berners-Lee to 
join them and form the W3C to drive web evolution. My old boss contacted 
me and easily convinced me that Oracle should join W3C as a "founding 
member".   I spent a few years as Oracle's rep to W3C.

/Jack

On 7/29/26 12:00, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> 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

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