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View Full Version : The Internet Turns 25 Years Old Today (30.04.2018)



Aragorn
30th April 2018, 20:54
There's a cookie for the first member who correctly identifies the operating system in the screenshot below. :p




Source: Popular Mechanics (https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/a20104417/www-public-domain/)



https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/screensnap2-24c-1525110634.jpg


Profit or the Wild West? Tim Berners-Lee made a choice we're all still feeling.



Twenty-five years ago today, the World Wide Web announced that it was for everybody. On April 30, 1993, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) put the web into the public domain a decision that has fundamentally altered the past quarter-century.

While the proto-internet dates back to the 1960s, the World Wide Web as we know it had been invented four year earlier in 1989 by CERN employee Tim Berners-Lee. The internet at that point was growing in popularity among academic circles but still had limited mainstream utility. Scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf had developed Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which allowed for easier transfer of information. But there was the fundamental problem of how to organize all that information.

In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks. In a proposal (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html), Berners-Lee asked CERN management to "imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse."

Four years later, the project was still growing. In January 1993, the first major web browser, known as MOSAIC, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. While there was a free version of MOSAIC, for-profit software companies purchased nonexclusive licenses to sell and support it. Licensing MOSAIC at the time (https://www.wired.com/1994/10/mosaic/) cost $100,000 plus $5 each for any number of copies.



https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/9304003-02-1525110556.jpg


The World Wide Web was made public domain only a few months after MOSAIC was released. On the organization's website (https://home.cern/topics/birth-web), it describes the decision thusly:










CERN made the next release available with an open license, as a more sure way to maximize its dissemination. Through these actions, making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser (http://line-mode.cern.ch/) and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.









The tension between each the routes of CERN and MOSAIC, the choice between a Wild West and high profit, has cropped up again and again in the history of the web.

Making the web public domain opened it up to anyone who had a computer. Berners-Lee's vision of a web opened entirely by its users may feel like a pipe dream (https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a14415548/net-neutrality-end-internet-golden-age/) these days, but it was an undeniable success. The choice for public domain put a foot down for users, as opposed to corporations, and the web has wrestled with the choice ever since.


Source: Popular Mechanics (https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/a20104417/www-public-domain/)

enjoy being
1st May 2018, 00:18
http://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/

No, I am not all schooled up on the names of 'obscure' OS, I just image searched the photo in the post. :-P

Aragorn
1st May 2018, 00:28
http://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/

No, I am not all schooled up on the names of 'obscure' OS, I just image searched the photo in the post. :-P

Well, you didn't actually guess the name of the operating system. You only gave the name of the browser that Tim Berners-Lee created. Therefore, thou shalt receive only half a cookie. :p



https://comps.canstockphoto.com/close-up-of-an-half-eaten-cookie-with-picture_csp51958171.jpg

enjoy being
1st May 2018, 00:56
Oh crumbs.. but I read the name of the OS in the first few lines of the article supplied, so just posted the article, presuming that it would be easily deduced, and that the article might be interesting.


Thanks for posting the article in thread though because popular mechanics won't let one read their website unless you allow them to advertise at you, so no go from this bro.

And meanwhile, 25 years later, I'm still battling through with a connection that drops every 3, 5 or 10 mins..

Aragorn
1st May 2018, 01:51
Oh crumbs.. but I read the name of the OS in the first few lines of the article supplied, so just posted the article, presuming that it would be easily deduced, and that the article might be interesting.

Well okay, here's a little bit of geeky history. :p The operating system was called NeXtSTeP, and the machine it ran on was called a NeXt. NeXt was the company founded by Steve Jobs after he had been fired — yes, read that again: he was fired — from Apple. The NeXt computers were very high-profile in design, with very powerful hardware, but they were also enormously expensive.

The operating system itself was essentially a modified BSD Unix with a proprietary graphical interface called OpenStep, the look & feel of which was later on copied in more standardized Unix graphical user interfaces such as GnuStep, AfterStep and WindowMaker, and even a replacement for the Windows GUI on Windows 95/98, called LiteStep.

After Jobs was rehired by Apple, NeXt was merged into Apple, and the NeXtSTeP operating system was renamed to Rhapsody and given a more traditional Macintosh user interface. This then in turn evolved into what would later become Apple OS X, with the Aqua user interface — more recently rebranded again into macOS. ;)


Thanks for posting the article in thread though because popular mechanics won't let one read their website unless you allow them to advertise at you, so no go from this bro.

Yes, I know, but I have a trick for that. When the nagware about disabling your ad blocker comes up, click "OK", and then immediately click on the (sometimes red) browser button with the "X" to stop the page from reloading. :p


And meanwhile, 25 years later, I'm still battling through with a connection that drops every 3, 5 or 10 mins..

Mine isn't that bad, but it's far from perfect either. My ISP has a habit of interrupting my connection without prior warning in order to conduct some reorganization at their end, and then I'm usually offline for a couple of hours. And at what they're charging me every month, that kind of thing should not happen quite as often as it does, grrrr! :mad: