Thursday, December 15, 2005

Happy (belated) Birthday, Web! Busy with the last weeks of classes and exams, I'll excuse myself for not noticing the passing of what is billed as the 15th birthday of the World Wide Web... I can't believe that the reminder today from CNN is the first to catch my eye... Especially when friends whose stuff I like to think I "read regularly" were on the case last month, including Paul Jones... the University of North Carolina Internetworker who had the first Web server I ever used (and, by then, quite a few others, at what is now ibiblio.org). The little Silicon Graphics machine (blake.unc.edu) that he used for my class was hardly his first server. His first was on a NeXT machine, the platform Tim Berners-Lee used to invent the Web, and code his first browser and editor. The result: UNC's Sunsite is listed here as one of the first 30 servers listed on an early Berners-Lee WWW page. Speaking of the NeXT, here's a picture of a slightly later version of its monochrome screen with WWW browser. Paul's note last month pointed to Duke professor James Boyle's column on the anniversary in the Financial Times, "Web's never to be repeated revolution." His title refers to the Web's "open" beginnings. "Why might we not create the web today?" Boyle asks, answering himself: "The web became hugely popular too quickly to control. The lawyers and policymakers and copyright holders were not there at the time of its conception." "'Allow anyone to connect to the network? Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy and pornography,'" he says, stating the "control" objections. "And of course it is. But it is also much, much more." "When the next disruptive communications technology [^] the next worldwide web [^] is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident," Boyle predicts, adding, "That is not a happy thought." Back to celebrating that birthday: It took me a little poking around http://www.w3.org/ to find evidence of specific "birthday" dates: a Nov. 12, 1990, proposal, and the creation of the first Web page the next day, which Wikipedia also mentions (at least tonight it does). However, I think I'll celebrate around Christmas, which Berners-Lee himself gives as a date for creation of the first Web browser. I also found several references to November 1990 in the W3.org archive of documents describing the program, WWW, which was both a hypertext browser and editor. Fittingly, one key document, a proposal for "the process of presenting this information as hypertext," titled Hyperizing FIND, is only available online in the format of what is now (as far as I know) a mostly-obsolete word processor for a that pretty-much-obsolete NeXT cube. Finally, here's one last "birthday" article I missed: The Web turns 15 - but are the bigco's ruining the party? at ZDnet. 2:07:25 AM    comment []

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