Comment by gerdesj
9 days ago
In 1992ish I worked at RNEC Manadon (UK, Devon). I was asked by my boss to investigate this new www thing.
I telnetted to the nearest VAX from my Win 3.1 PC. I then telnetted to the X.25 PAD and used that to go via the US to Switzerland and CERN. It looked just like gopher and WAIS to me and that's how I reported back - "it looks the same as gopher".
When Tim BL invented www, html and that, browsers were telnet and graphics was a nonsense.
The experience was very different on a NeXT computer.
WAIS was modeled after the built in DigitalLibrarian software. You would select a site in the upper pane, and enter a search term in the box in the middle, and a list of documents would come back in the bottom pane that you could double click and open. Very search engine like.
Gopher was structured and I think Gemini today still sticks with the format. You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane.
WWW didn't seem like much in comparison because they were freeform documents without app level navigation support and there wasn't support for images or much formatting and people had not learned to make web pages so it was really hard to see the future of what it would grow to become.
I'm not known for picking winners :-(
My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row.
I had a friend who was the most junior developer on the Mosaic team and one day he took me to his office to show me a text document with an image in the middle of it. In theory I met Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina that day but I just wanted to go do something with my friend. I did not get it. At all. A year later my girlfriend had to re-explain it to me and then another few months later I applied to work there in a support role. I don't think she knew what to do with the level of enthusiasm I wasn't bringing to this opportunity.
A year after that I'm sitting in a bar after a tech convention in Chicago, wearing my Mosaic t-shirt, and someone said, 'where did you get that shirt?' When I told them we were on the team, you'd have thought I'd said we were Madonna's backup band.
I never entirely understood that "I'd rather be lucky than good" sentiment until my luck ran out, and now I know.
>"My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row."
Ha, I missed so many great things. The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started.
Luckily (or not) I am an easy going person and do not dwell on things.
10 replies →
But you were lucky. You were in the right places at the right time, just didn't realize it.
This is lack of vision, not lack of luck.
Love it. This is all soo very Nelson Bighetti.
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> people had not learned to make web pages
Because there wasn't a widespread usable browser until Mosaic came along, 2 1/2 years after WWW.
> WAIS was[…] Gopher was[…]
> You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane.
You're mentioning formats and protocols but describing application UI designs.
...because they were apps. WAIS.app, Gopher.app, WWW.app
Something that just occurred to me: RAGs are almost Gopher for AIs.
I worked at an EDI company in the mid 90s. X.25 was the wild west. We had a router set up on it that would happily stand up a ppp session to anyone that knew the node name. No password, right on the core network lol.
It certainly was! I remember connecting to Tymnet and Sprintnet/Telenet as a teenager, probably around 1990 or 91. Someone on a local BBS gave me a username that let me connect to QSD and another European chat system. Someone on there had taken over the "system" account on a VAX and was giving out accounts that let you use it as PAD. This went on for weeks. The company must've freaked when they got their x.25 bill. Zero security in those days. The early Internet was just as bad.
Everything connected to the internet was really bad until automatic updates that are enabled by default (or enforced by sysadmins) became a thing. Wordpress, Mysql, Active Directory... all those things had unpatched exploits that you could trivially tap in to until the 2010s if you knew how to use nmap and metasploit. Add insecure wifi standards like wep and basically every other network was fair game for people who had some basic skills. Heck, facebook only made https mandatory in 2013 after someone made a browser plugin that let literally everyone steal cookies on public networks and log in to other people's accounts. Gen Zers never saw this, but the modern web as a secure place where you can comfortably buy stuff or do banking without worries is a relatively recent invention.
I got on the 'Net in 1993. The Web was very "meh". A lot of tutorials on how to write HTML, very little useful content yet. IRC and Usenet were where the action was.
Wired Magazine famously agreed with you. Usenet was where it was at then.
Internet commercialization wasn't really on until 1994. Then anyone could get dial-up IP, they could put ads on their webpages, and etc.
I remember that. I had almost zero interest in www until geocities came along and then …it was something else to compose and publish a “website”
The whole thing was atrocious but at least introduced me to the concept.
In fact, I had to spend like three days downloading Netscape to try it out because I didn’t even have a graphical browser yet.
Every time I'm downloading something and "only" getting a megabyte/sec download I take a deep breath and remember the days when I was getting 0.5KB/sec.