The World Wide Web (1994)
linuxjournal.com "The burden of the Web on a Linux server was tested by creating a working Web site on a i386-33 Linux machine. During a 40 day span, the PSU Linux WWW received 5375 requests from 1328 different sites around the world. This is an average of 6.9 requests per hour and 165 per day. The Web requests never interfered with any work being done by other users at the machine. A Linux system can easily provide Web services and have horsepower to spare."
I was actually surprised that Linux was mature enough that it had a "journal" dedicated to it when the web was new - my memory is hazy, but if I'd had to guess, I would have guessed that the web actually predated linux. I was definitely already pretty familiar with the world-wide web before I had heard of Linux.
It does predate Linux but it's more complicated. Think about Linux Journal at the time as more "Linux newsletter". "The Web" was initially on OpenStep and commercial Unixes like HP-UX, Irix and SunOS.
It was becoming dominant at that time amidst its siblings like gopher, uucp, archie, netnews, etc but still was pretty new.
Here's a hype video from DEC about the web in early 1994 for example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-1l6aBgX5UY
That browser is NCSA mosaic btw and I presume that's running Tru64. 1994 was still very much the era of educating people, even professionals, about the WWW
In case those who aren't as old as us are confused, "animated gif" is not a redundant term. There was a time when static gifs were just as common as animated ones, if not more so!
:upsidedown-face:
(definitely for sure more-so if you include spacer.gif)
More so. Mid-nineties web static images were either jpg og gif. Preferably gifs, which mostly compressed way better for anything but photos. With proper indexing, color limitation, dithering, bitcount, and vigilant observance of proper websafe color palette you could shave amazing extra kilobytes off precious bandwith. Animations were for Geocities.
Even worse, GIF was not intended to be just an “animated image format”, it was “general purpose media streaming format” which incorporated frames/layers, sequence ordering, palette switches, and compression (also, one couldn't be sure that client hardware can decode and paint even a single frame fast enough).
Some old picture book or presentation type GIF files have 0 delay time between frames (doesn't work well with software of later decades, when GIF animations became common), and 0 is “draw as soon as possible” in the specification. Even a simple viewer program without support for metadata or user interaction would have to wait for each frame to be received via modem link, and it would take some time, especially for full screen images. Therefore, a competent GIF viewer software should have an option to simulate 1200 baud download for those old files, and compute the additional delay based on frame size in bytes.
Gosh, most of those pages are so fast to load and so readable.
I remember reading a weekly newsletter (perhaps in email but probably on Usenet) that listed all the best new websites that had been set up. One week such-and-such university's law school had set up a site that listed their state's laws (but for the full text you still had to go to the library). I can't remember what it was called - it could have been Jerry and David's Guide, which became Yahoo, but all snapshots that I can find look more like an attempt at a comprehensive hierarchical list than a weekly "what's new".
"Mosaic is truly a high-quality application. But the price for beauty is more memory and disk space. Mosaic consumes over 1.3MB of disk space, and will use about 2MB of RAM while running."
I don't know about those fancy graphical browsers, who has those kinds of resources to just throw at some pretty pictures?
I also disagree that Mosaic was a "truly high-quality application". I remember it being a buggy, finicky mess. But it did something unique and brand new, so I put up with it.
It was pretty amazing at the time. Most tech people I knew just used GUIs to tile lots of terminal windows.
I built Mosaic from source, and I remember scrolling through an article on Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in front of my boss.
When the image of the comet hitting Jupiter scrolled into view, he nearly fell off his chair.
Oh no, I only have 640K
That ought to be enough for anybody.
I wish they had come up with a different name than WWW or World Wide Web. Those are too long to say. Internet is inaccurate. Web and Net haven’t really caught on, in my experience. I’m not sure what a better name would be, but ideally three syllables or less that people would actually use consistently. Too late now.
Fix the root of the problem, not the symptom. The name of the letter W is in itself too long and doesn't make sense anymore, anyway. The name of the letter, therefore, should be changed so when it's pronounced, it sounds similar to the names of many other letters (B, C, D, E, G, etc., and Z except in Commonwealth countries). Thus "www" when spoken would be pronounced "wee wee wee".
"Who's goin' wee wee wee?" https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z7DTIJlcP6s
I hear "web" often enough when specifically referring to WWW. Nowadays most people interact with each other via apps, so I think "internet" is accurate enough.
Hmm, in my experience insofar as anyone really refers to the web these days (mostly tech people), it's the web. Browsing the web, web browser, web server, web app, websockets, WebGL, and so on. Normal people just use "the internet", and have always used, not really aware or caring about what the difference is. Approximately nobody has called the web "world wide web" or "www" in the past 15 to 20 years, and nobody has even said "www" after essentially all URLs went www-less (and good riddance!)
As a sibling commenter said, these days most people don't even really refer to the internet often, because it just is, ubiquitous, ever-present, and accessed via apps that abstract it out even more. Being connected is the default state of matters, and does not require a specific term. Just like you don't often need to refer to or think about the air surrounding you.
Back when a Finnish radio channel got a website, they had an infuriating ad where they played Surfin' USA by the Beach Boys and invited everyone to come surf on their site, and read out their URL: aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash double-u double-u double-u... I suppose browsers started filling in the URL scheme pretty early, because I remember somebody arguing that you shouldn't leave it out, it could well be ftp or gopher or who knows what they invent next.
Slashdot was reputedly named slashdot to make spelling out the URL humorously awkward: h t t p colon slash slash slash dot dot com.
How about saying "dub dub dub" like everyone does in practice?
I've always loved that World Wide Web is faster to say than WWW. I never say it, but it's interesting!
We entertained "dub-three" in those days, but it didn't catch on. The nickname, I mean.
I worked as a consultant connecting businesses to the Internet, and boss asked me if I thought this WWW thing was here to stay, or a fad. I replied, "meh, it's a fad" because I had been underwhelmed by its implementation, compared to some mind-blowing infrastructure systems, GUIs and wonders like the MBONE (talk about fads).
I believe that the tipping point for WWW is when it was realized as a platform for delivering applications (SaaS). Once that angle became apparent, all resources were expended on making that a reality.
Yes, 3 syllables versus 9 syllables. Funny, isn't it?
Online
It's always nice to see early definitions of the Web, because those definitions are something we've largely lost today on a societal level (or confused with the Internet or the cloud).
The Internet is a worldwide computer network and the World Wide Web refers to the worldwide collection of web servers (wherever they may be) hosting HTML-accessible content. And the cloud is just a new term for the World Wide Web that expands the definition to include the worldwide collection of any Internet-accessible service, including web apps.
> cloud is just a new term for the World Wide Web
I think of cloud computing as network-accessible computing resources, often provided by commercial services like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.. (Though private clouds are also a possibility.)
These services typically provide web-based management interfaces and HTTPS-based control APIs, but the computing resources themselves are not tied to the web or HTTP(S). For example I usually interact with cloud computing resources using SSH - a modern equivalent to the remote terminal/remote login protocols that predated the web by decades.
Perhaps you are thinking of CDNs like Cloudflare or Akamai which cache web content for faster access, scalability, and resistance to DDoS?
WinGopher "Complete" ... $129.00 ...
Shame that UMN may have sabotaged gopher with licensing fees.
On the other hand many web browsers supported gopher for another decade at least.
The article says that there were “millions” of users, and at the time I felt like I was a late adopter despite being a Gopher user, then WWW, starting with Lynx and then Mosaic.
It’s weird to look back and realise that I was among the first 0.1% of people alive today, to start using the web.
When I first got on in the UK in the early 90s I think I could probably name almost every commercial user of the Internet.