_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI World Wide Web (1991)
Aeroi wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
A good reminder that the technologies that are most transformative in
society often times start out appearing deeply complex with a poor UX
for the average individual.
mhandley wrote 1 day ago:
I upgraded the UCL CS webserver to CERN/3.0 (the last CERN httpd
release) running on a Sun Sparcstation 10 back in 1994, and it has been
in production use ever since. The hardware got replaced at least once
(our sysadmin has a large pile of spare mid-1990s Sparc hardware), and
the NFS server storing the data has changed more than once, but it's
the same software install still running on 1990s Sun hardware. It
needed some minor patches for Y2K, but nothing in the 24 years since.
Will be 30 years this summer. Needless to say as it predates SSL, it's
no longer our primary server, but it does still serve everyone's home
pages.
% nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80
HEAD /staff/M.Handley/ HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
MIME-Version: 1.0
Server: CERN/3.0
Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 22:06:54 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 9973
Last-Modified: Thu, 07 Dec 2023 13:26:26 GMT
MaintenanceMode wrote 1 day ago:
That's so amazing. That Sun sparc 10 was a beast of a machine. I had
one running until 2020. It was seemingly unstoppable. It broke my
heart to send it off to recycling, it's weird being emotional about a
computer. It had been serving web pages (on-and-off) since 1997.
peterbmarks wrote 1 day ago:
I remember having an O'Reilly book titled "The Whole Internet".
Hilarious concept. Gopher was pretty cool at the time.
flenserboy wrote 1 day ago:
At the beginning of that Fall term one of my classmates pulled up next
to me while I was working on a NeXT box in our lab. He had me pull up
an app he'd had a hand in working on over his summer in Switzerland.
"Check it out â this is going to be great. So much better than
Gopher," he said. After following a few links I replied, "It's nice,
but doesn't provide much more than Gopher right now." "No â but it
will." It was fun to be able to see things in the earliest days of the
web, & to see how it grew. Never would have guessed at the time that
the browser would become the centerpiece of most people's computer use.
smm11 wrote 1 day ago:
I remember the first day we started Mosaic on a work computer, then
looked around at Gopher pages.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
From the news link, this is actually from November 1992.
linearrust wrote 1 day ago:
No blinking neon text that could send a blind man into an uncontrolled
violent seizure?
dailykoder wrote 1 day ago:
>You can try the simple line mode browser by telnetting to info.cern.ch
(no user or password. From UK JANET, use the Gateway).
doen't work for me :(
xeromal wrote 1 day ago:
I just tried it too. lol
jpcfl wrote 1 day ago:
Sad. Here's a simulator:
URI [1]: http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
ape4 wrote 1 day ago:
No rush, but maybe somebody could fix this stray tag at the end [1] ,
etc.
URI [1]: ...
pbd wrote 1 day ago:
wow. looks cool.
twilightzone wrote 1 day ago:
Even works in reader mode.
tomxor wrote 1 day ago:
I was hoping this was still being served on the same Next Cube with the
"do not power down!!" label, but the HTTP headers strongly suggest not.
Maybe it's pointlessly romantic but I like the idea of machines and
software continuing to perform their job well past their life
expectancy. Voyager 1 has to be the most celebrated example. Maybe it's
because it makes me care more about crafting things if they are a
little less ephemeral than the modern software churn would make us
believe.
lokimedes wrote 1 day ago:
Last time (~2012) I saw that machine, it was exhibited at the CERN
Computing Center lobby. Its sibling, Timâs workstation was
exhibited at CERNâs public museum. Both long disconnected.
simonw wrote 1 day ago:
It would be neat to catch up on what all of the people listed on [1]
have been doing for the last thirty years. I bet they are an
interesting bunch!
URI [1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/People.html
marstall wrote 1 day ago:
"there is no 'top' to the web" <= words that were mind blowing to me at
the time
johnc_ wrote 1 day ago:
Will never take off.
tejohnso wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting comments from the FAQ regarding resource discovery:
May...1992...
"By the way, it would be easy in principle for a third party to run
over these [hyperlink] trees and make indexes of what they find. Its
just that noone has done it as far as I know because there isn't yet an
indexer which runs over the web directly."
...
"In the long term, when there is a really large mass of data out there,
with deep interconnections, then there is some really exciting work to
be done on automatic algorithms to make multi-level searches."
Altavista came out in 1995, Google Search 2 years later.
KingOfCoders wrote 1 day ago:
I found the syntax interesting
/HEPDATA/REAC?P+PBAR list of reactions involving p and pbar (?)
URI [1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ServerWriter.html
adriangrigore wrote 1 day ago:
I also jokingly refer to [1] as the first version of my static site
generator
URI [1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ShellScript.html
URI [2]: https://mkws.sh/
KingOfCoders wrote 1 day ago:
"If you know the perl language, then that is a powerful (if otherwise
incomprehensible) language with which to hack together a server."
Perl was the first language I wrote dynamic websites in around ~1993
so this made me laugh.
adriangrigore wrote 1 day ago:
Things have sure gotten better now. :D
niek_pas wrote 1 day ago:
Look at how fucking fast this page loads. No newsletter banners. No
ads. Easy to read, responsive. Why can't more of the web be like this.
potency wrote 1 day ago:
Because expectations have increased since the early 90's and servers
cost money.
mihaaly wrote 1 day ago:
It is so refreshing seeing content first simple pages from time to time
in the cacophony of attention seeking (obstructively injecting
themselves) pages with zero or negative (misinformation, misdirection,
pure lies and harm) content. It is no fun using the World Wide Web
anymore, it is a pure danger zone and struggle.
Except exceptions like this one here.
One of my sorrow how formally respectable mediums like BBC suck up to
this crap trend. Their scrolling articles where your fingers get tired
while the emptionally manipulative and exagerating nothing with active
shiny presentation goes is something I ever finished, but once I tried.
Rubbish! (and unluckily their content too in general, even for the
simpler text articles, increasingly, all oppinion random quotes dipped
in thick dripping emotional manipulation). Have to read The Economist
instead. Not cheap but there the content matter still over the form.
RetroTechie wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of
useful/interesting websites. Webrings, category-sorted directories
with an entry 'portal' & similar.
These mostly disappeared as the web's content size exploded,
maintaining those directories became too much work, and search
engines were just so much easier / better to find what you're looking
for.
These days: ad & tracking infested bloated trash everywhere, and
search engine's usefulness have declined. Putting the few "small web"
gems out there in a curated directory, might just be easier than
trawling through heaps & heaps of junk (or in near-future: have AI
assistant do that for you).
A kind of white-listing, if you will.
chuckadams wrote 1 day ago:
> Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of
useful/interesting websites.
HN and other link-aggregation forums are more or less a
crowdsourced version of that.
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
I remember a text mode BBC site a la [1] and [2] . Now it's not any
more.
Gemini with gemini://gemi.dev/waffle.cgi opening the full BBC URL
(with [3] on front) would be the closest to that.
Edit:
gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/links?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews
Try Lagrange in a PC or Android and open this URL.
URI [1]: https://lite.cnn.io
URI [2]: https://text.npr.org
URI [3]: https://
lmihaig wrote 1 day ago:
We should be forever grateful that places like CERN exist, which
strive for open science and open source.
ricksunny wrote 1 day ago:
Does anyone know if TBL was inspired by Vannnevar Bush's Memex proposal
at all?
Progressively through time we hear references to Memex as 'predicted
computers',
'predicted search'
'predicted hypertext', "predicted AI",
to which I would add
'predicted tagging' and
'predicted recommendation engines'
[note the steady progression of our own technology through time
reflected in the above list]
And there's still at least one more Memex prediction of something
useful that I feel we still haven't produced yet.
edit
(Ah I see that the wikipedia article for TBL mentions Memex
front-and-center, so a pretty trivially identifiable association I
guess.)
BirAdam wrote 1 day ago:
According to his own words, he wasnât aware of Bush, Engelbart, or
Nelson when he started working on Enquire, but hypertext more
generally was known to him. He became aware of those other men and
their work over time and their ideas helped to refine his own.
ricksunny wrote 20 hours 17 min ago:
Thanks for that!
Incidentally, Vannevar Bush's Oral History 14-part document [1]
seems to have served as an early experiment in prototyping
hypertext. It has lots of [X-Ref] items throughout that refer to
other relevant parts of the (1000+ page) oral history. I'm not
aware of that being a common documentation practice at the time, so
I see it as an intentional prototype effort on his part.
URI [1]: https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/687
Scarblac wrote 1 day ago:
I remember finding the WWW in 1993 when it wasn't really more than
about a thousand pages at CERN.
And I didn't see what was so special about it, and didn't do anything
with it... I mean Gopher had archie so it was searchable. And I didn't
care much about physics.
Keyframe wrote 1 day ago:
How's this different than gopher? At least gopher is well-established;
This will never catch on.
olddustytrail wrote 1 day ago:
My exact feelings on seeing Cello browser.
thomasahle wrote 1 day ago:
Gopher also has a much more familiar UI with navigation menus. This
"hyperlink" idea is typical ivory tower thinking. Nobody outside of
academia will want to use this.
And support for images/multimedia? The internet bandwidth this
requires will limit it to just a few elite institutions.
chrisco255 wrote 1 day ago:
There's probably a Usenet thread with this exact text in some
archive...
BrandoElFollito wrote 1 day ago:
I had the chance to work at CERN at that time (student, then PhD). I
remember navigating on a demo site and being the visionary I am, I
thought "ah, cool. Time for lunch".
I also mined some 100 bitcoins when they just appeared, out of
curiosity. I forgot about the program running and came back to see
these ~100 bitcoins. Being the visionary I am, I thought "ah, cool.
Let's clean up and time for lunch".
Some people are doomed to be executors and only catch up.
MaintenanceMode wrote 1 day ago:
I too am similarly gifted. Back in the usenet days a group I was on
received its first spam. There was some discussion about whether this
type of thing would get out of control. I confidently proclaimed that
there was no way spam would ever be more than a minor nuisance.
gerdesj wrote 1 day ago:
I only mined around 1 BT when they were "worth" about £5 and then
lost the wallet because I ran out of floppies for my transfer of data
from old to new PC or I forgot about it (which is more likely).
I thought the www looked a bit mad and disorganized when I first
telnetted to it via the US from UK.
Time for lunch.
defaultcompany wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah I remember using NCSA mosaic to browse the early web and
thinking âwhatâs the point of this we already have FTP and
archieâ.
13of40 wrote 1 day ago:
Let me tell you about my grand scheme, circa 1991 or thereabouts, of
downloading small images from BBSes and embedding them inline with
the text.
cubefox wrote 1 day ago:
My reaction when I first heard of the concept of a "wiki" where
everyone is allowed to edit some post (curiously before I heard about
Wikipedia): I thought such a system would immediately be ruined by
vandalism. It didn't occur to me that there may be way more people
who undo vandalism than there are vandals.
Or when I first heard about Twitter. My immediate reaction was: "I'm
unusually open to wacky Web 2.0 ideas, but even I have to admit you
can't say anything of substance in just 140 characters." And indeed,
looking up some random tweets seemed to confirm this suspicion.
Interestingly, this wasn't just my reaction. A lot of us "tech
enthusiasts" had this opinion about Twitter.
cxr wrote 1 day ago:
> My reaction when I first heard of the concept of a "wiki" where
everyone is allowed to edit some post (curiously before I heard
about Wikipedia): I thought such a system would immediately be
ruined
There are people who think that today, despite well-known existence
proofs we have to the contrary.
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
I mean a lot of internet places have been destroyed by vandalism
and upkeep costs, what were seeing us just survivorship bias and
survival of the fittest.
cxr wrote 1 day ago:
In other words, existence proofs that such systems won't
automatically be ruined.
pixl97 wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
I'd disagree, they require a massive amount of moderation and
clean up to keep running. The default state is ruined and
only by herculean effort is it usable by others.
It's like a park in a high drug use area. Quite often they
are ruined, and only by massive expenditure of effort are is
it even near safe.
cxr wrote 14 hours 3 min ago:
Even if your reply made sense as a response (it doesn't),
I've been involved with multiple wikis, and your claims
aren't true.
demondemidi wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds fake. This ainât Reddit.
BrandoElFollito wrote 1 day ago:
From your profile it looks like you are even older than me.
I find it strange that you did not go through similar stories -
tech in the 90s was rather eventful. Maybe you were at the wrong
place?
xcv123 wrote 1 day ago:
No. It was that easy to mine bitcoins back then and just throw them
away. Interesting but worthless at the time.
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
Yep. Needless to say I have a few regrets after haphazardly
losing USB sticks from back in those days.
Arisaka1 wrote 1 day ago:
Reminds me of the all-time classic (now) HN discussion on Dropbox [1]
as I got older I realized that, you can never ever hope to choose
what will be successful or important, and that is true down to the
most seemingly small action you can make. The world is simply too
complex and interdependent for that.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
jbverschoor wrote 1 day ago:
How about lunch sometimes?
rqtwteye wrote 1 day ago:
Oh my. Same here. I mined quite a few bitcoins on a friendâs PC a
long time ago. Then we tried to do something with them but you
couldnât even buy a beer. So we forgot about the bitcoins and the
disk is probably on a trash heap somewhere now.
lovegrenoble wrote 1 day ago:
What a pity (
hparadiz wrote 1 day ago:
Time to get the IBN 5100 and go back in time.
helpfulContrib wrote 1 day ago:
Its 1992. A friend of mine has asked me to meet with someone, to
discuss the idea of 'selling things through the web'. I didn't like
the idea - "this is not what the Internet is for... and the web is
too esoteric, difficult to set up and use, TCP/IP WinSock blahblah",
and I dismiss the thing entirely on an ideological basis. That
friend goes on to participate in something that later became ..
Amazon.
Its 1994. I turn on the modem back at an ISP I've just built, in a
place called Los Feliz. After a few months of putting out the fires,
I decide "this ISP thing is balls", and I leave. The guy I built the
first data center for, goes on to be worth 300 million buckaroonies.
Its 1996. An associate has flown us to San Francisco for the day, to
meet a guy who has been trying to get his auction site launched for
the past year. We have lunch, we discuss the whole concept of
'online auctions', I dismiss it as being unviable "because latency"
and legal jurisdiction. Okay, a few years later, I buy a synthesizer
on EBay. I still have it, to remind me of myopia.
Its 1997. I get hired to make a bookmark-management site, called
"Storease". I build it, but I don't like it. People will find
things, then add their URL to our site, and collect "Storease".
"This will be too expensive to scale properly unless someone comes up
with data-centers as a commodity..." Something about this rubs me up
the wrong way. Could've been delicious, though.
Its 2010. I buy a few bitcoins, for 30 cents each, and keep them
around long enough to make .. 300 bucks. I'm proud of myself for
selling 10 bitcoins and making 300 bucks.
This stuff happens. Its a difficult thing for technologically
inclined ideologues to see the woods for the trees.
Its 2023. I am still ignoring crypto. All my friends are
millionaires. I'm just glad to have a new version of JUCE to play
with ...
BrandoElFollito wrote 1 day ago:
Honestly, this is like I am reading my bio.
I had several of these along the way (including having a proposal
to create a company but I was too busy courting a girl - they sold
it for around 100M⬠and split in in three :))
I work in high tech (bleeding edge) and spend my time automating my
home and writing open source (when not working). My wife, from time
to time, mentions how much I could do and my son cannot understand
why I do not want to go further up the company pyramid. But I am
happy, I have all the money I need and can now sit in front of my
screen answering to HN while keeping an eye on the dinner I am
cooking.
So yeah, lots of lost opportunities but the partying was wild :)
And yeah, I am still ignoring bitcoins when the guys in my team are
making money (but live on an emotional rollercoaster :))
YZF wrote 1 day ago:
- I thought Google was too expensive at its IPO.
- "Cloud" seemed like marketing nonsense to me.
- I still think bitcoin is a scam.
On the plus side I did end up working for some tech companies that
did very well. No complaints.
It's really hard (read as impossible) to predict the future.
Efficient markets and all that. If it was clear that Google would
go where it went then it'd be priced even higher. Even if you knew
that "selling things online is the future" in 1992 it's not always
clear how to act on that knowledge. You could have gone bust with
pets.com or something.
Fast forward to today. What is today's Google? What is today's
"cloud"? What is today's bitcoin? Someone is saying something about
something, someone is right, many are wrong.
imperialdrive wrote 1 day ago:
Similar. Just along for the ride. It's still rewarding and can
last a long time in good health. Hope you're enjoying it too!
ironmanszombie wrote 1 day ago:
I, too, mined some bitcoins when it first appeared. My computer at
the time was housed in a case of plywood that I'd made.
I wonder if my crappy computer from over 20 years ago has at least a
Bitcoin in it?
Well, time for qat now. Will dig it out later.
hnfong wrote 1 day ago:
1900s grandfather: I buried a sack of gold coins in my backyard.
2000s grandfather: The computer that I used to mine bitcoin is
probably in the pile of junk inside the garage.
gbolcer wrote 1 day ago:
LMAO. I have about 150 Bitcoins sitting on an old hard drive at
the bottom of the local dump. I guess someone would try to dig
them up if it ever hits a million, but doubtful they could
recover them much less unlock them.
arrowsmith wrote 1 day ago:
> The computer that I used to mine bitcoin is probably in the
pile of junk inside the garage
It's funny because it's true:
URI [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55658942
xorcist wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe "true" isn't the best word to use. There are too many
stories like this for them all to be true. Great story though.
kolinko wrote 1 day ago:
At that time you even had bitcoin faucets that gave you
0.5-1-5 btc to play around. Or you could just run a miner on
your gpu and get 50btc if you ran it for a few days or so - a
ton of people probably have those on some partition on an old
laptop or sth.
xorcist wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, but we know where those coins are now: in circulation.
And we have a good grasp how many that is and how many
could possibly on on those shelved laptops. It is literally
how every coin in circulation was minted as there is no
central party, only your peer devices.
ramon156 wrote 1 day ago:
Wanna have lunch sometime?
badsectoracula wrote 1 day ago:
That reminds me of my reaction when i first saw Minecraft back in the
TIGSource forums: "this looks like a level editor i made a few years
ago, it was fun to make levels with it but i doubt anyone is going to
buy a level editor" :-P.
webdevver wrote 1 day ago:
just out of curiosity, what were you doing before you had lunch
today?
elwell wrote 1 day ago:
GP was reading about my new LLM startup, remarked how it seemed
'cool' and then went off to lunch. BTW, did I mention I'm looking
for investors?
linearrust wrote 1 day ago:
Given his trajectory, probably was busy in the lab and about to
find the cure for cancer. Then lunch happened.
elderlybanana wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe reading about passkeys imminent death on HN?
cubefox wrote 1 day ago:
Or reading an article about AI being overhyped?
Keyframe wrote 1 day ago:
any recent of dem visions?
taulien wrote 1 day ago:
This page [1] is still "Under Construction", I am wondering, when they
will finish it :)
[1]
URI [1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Server.html
jak2k wrote 1 day ago:
We should go back to the roots. The modern web is too bloated.
gerdesj wrote 1 day ago:
Yes and no. A modern house is ridiculously bloated compared to what
my ancestors lived in or even a tent but I wont give it up.
You only really need a kitchen and somewhere to take a dump
(defecate), separate from the kitchen. The kitchen gets you warmth
and shelter from most weather in temperate to arctic climes, shade in
warmer climes. The bog need not be "inside" but should be separate
for obvious sanitary reasons. Oh and you'll need clean water,
something to eat and something to burn for cooking and heat.
Tesco and co (supermarkets) can bugger off for being too bloated.
I'll be going in with a knife (veg and fruit), spear and bow and
arrow (food that moves). Mind you the bow is a bit excessive unless
the food that moves is dangerous at close quarters 8)
Having said that: FAANG n that really is bloat that could be excised
with little of importance lost from the web sigh. How on earth have
we found ourselves in a world where "going viral" is a stretch goal
and an indicator of success? GOPHER and WAIS and USENET were good
enough, back in the day. We still have email for some reason and I
can still run my own, from home, but not everyone can.
In around 1994 I was asked by my boss to investigate this new web
thing. I had a Windows 3.11 PC. I telnetted to my departmental VAX.
From that I telnetted to the organization's X.25 PAD. From that I
could get from JANET to some exotic American NIST related thing ...
then I would hit a GOPHER menu (I think) and after a bit of jiggery
pokery I hit the web.
I could not really tell the difference, as an end user, between WWW
and GOPHER/WAIS. The hyperlinks were simply distributed (through the
text) instead of a list of menus. Instead of a page of a menu of
links you got text with links in it - all a bit chaotic. Basically,
a tree becomes a web. I told the boss it looked a bit better than
the menus of G/W but nothing really new. I think I even said to him
that the status quo is organized like his hard disc and hence
comprehensible but the web is a bit mad and freeform.
Do bear in mind that this is in a console, the browser was yet to
become mainstream.
I'm not an important commentator on internets for obvious reasons! I
completely missed the point that free form and a bit mad is exactly
what was required for the web to go viral in no uncertain terms.
deepspace wrote 1 day ago:
> You only really need a kitchen and somewhere to take a dump
(defecate), separate from the kitchen
Completely off-topic, but that reminds me of when I went hunting
for my first apartment as a broke grad student. One of the places
I viewed consisted of (only) a tiny living room and a tinier
kitchen. The toilet was in the kitchen, sandwiched between the
stove and sink. The only countertop area was a swing-up board
above the toilet. Must have sucked if you had to take a dump in
the middle of preparing dinner.
simonh wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm continually astounded by the incredible shoddiness and
unfitness for purpose of so many commercial web sites. The more time
goes on, youâd think figuring out how to make a functioning web
site would become better known, but no. In many ways it gets worse.
gjvc wrote 1 day ago:
erroneous leading space on the first link. splendid.
GoofballJones wrote 1 day ago:
I remember when this first dropped and I was like "this will never
catch on. The Internet is using telnet to log into different
systems....and FTP...and Usenet...and gopher...and IRC. This World Wide
Web is just a gimmick.
Hey, I never said I was a visionary.
CynicusRex wrote 1 day ago:
The first website is still more user-friendly, faster, and prettier
than most of the Web today.
âWeb4 should run on LaTeX.
The World Wide Web is broken: it is dominated by a handful of websites,
nearly everything is financed by ads, bloated tech needlessly slows
down surfing, NFTs and blockchain are digital cancer, et cetera. Stop
it. Just stop it.â â [1] --
POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere ( [2] )
URI [1]: https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/web4.html
URI [2]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
Just use Gemini, or Gopher. Gopher can be read with POSIX
netcat+echo+less or gawk. Gemini, with Gawk and OpenSSL: [1] On
chess, telnet/netcat to freechess.org 5000. Use awk+nc or gawk to
change the replace the chess pieces into UTF8 if you care.
No JS, No ads, no nothing. A 486 can still play networked chess, lurk
at HN or Reddit via gopher://hngopher.com and
gopher://gopherddit.com, read news via gopher://magical.fish (and
even translate things from English to French or Spanish) play
Nethack/Slashem, emulate the GB, play MP2 and MOD files, use IRC, use
chat services against bitlbee.org with an IRC client, telnet to SDF
and do crazy things with Emacs (from reading novels to comment on
Mastodon/IRC and even play IF with Malyon), also, coding in Elisp.
Also, when the Gopher->Gemini bridge gets ready, you will be able to
browse UTF8 Gemini and web sites wth just Lynx and a dumb 386 with a
relative modernish GNU/Linux, such as a minimal install of Delicate
Linux. Add gemini://gemi.dev on top of that and even modern web will
be at least article-(text) readable, such as Ars Technica, Wired and
The Register.
And the bandwidth usage will be good for any user, too. No more data
caps with tethered connections, gopher/gemini can be ridiculously
small on bw.
With gemini://gemi.dev I could read news far away from a city, near
train tunnels. The size of a web page was reduced from near a MB to
few KBs.
URI [1]: http://git.vgx.fr/gem.awk/
zarazas wrote 1 day ago:
Did you post this because of Kneipenquiz from Rocket Beans? :D
geuis wrote 1 day ago:
Nope. Was looking at some old abandonware games from when I was a kid
and that got me thinking about the first time I got online on the
actual web, not aol or whatever we had back then. Then I remembered
that the original site used to be still running and checked if it was
active.
mopsi wrote 1 day ago:
And even there we can see copyright issues:
Information by Subject
Music
Song lyrics (apparently disabled for copyright reasons)
URI [1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview....
tempodox wrote 1 day ago:
I still remember how lyrics.wikia.com had to shut down because of
copyright issues. It was a site where users could edit and publish
song lyrics.
wanderingstan wrote 1 day ago:
And Iâm still mourning the loss of the Online Guitar Archives
(OLGA); I still have printouts of all the songs I attempted to
learn on guitar.
gattilorenz wrote 1 day ago:
I think most of the OLGA tabs have been moved to Ultimate Guitar
(which supposedly compensates authors or has other ways to be
copyright-compliant?) and if you look for semi-unknown songs from
the 90s you can still find them, in their beautiful notepad-like
glory.
Up to a few years ago it also didn't have an atrocious interface
with plenty of antipatterns. Now, on the other hand...
bobvanluijt wrote 1 day ago:
Same! That was a sad day
mrbluecoat wrote 1 day ago:
Similar feelings when Napster (the original cool version) and
Grooveshark shut down.
throw310822 wrote 1 day ago:
Did someone already make a monument of these words? They would look
great carved in stone, with markup and everything:
World Wide WebThe WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area [1] information
retrieval
initiative aiming to give universal
access to a large universe of documents.
Everything there is online about
W3 is linked directly or indirectly
to this document, including...
URI [1]: WhatIs.html
tambourine_man wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder about that name attribute. Was it a tabindex equivalent?
guessmyname wrote 1 day ago:
The name attribute is used to create a named anchor. [1] When using
named anchors you can create links to a specific section on a page,
instead of letting your viewer scroll around to find what he/she is
looking for. Named anchors are called bookmarks in Expression Web.
NOTE: Not supported in HTML5. Use the global id attribute instead.
Specifies the name of an anchor
You can also use the name attribute on the server side to identify
the fields in form submits. [2][3] [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://www.expression-web-tutorials.com/anchor-tags.html
URI [2]: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_name.asp
URI [3]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1397613
tambourine_man wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks, I remember it was replaced by the ID attribute, but in
this case, it is not being used as a named anchor. It seem more
like an index.
hallhassi wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
each link was displayed with a number next to it in
parentheses.[1] type the number to go to the link.
URI [1]: https://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject...
bazoom42 wrote 1 day ago:
The name attribute can be an arbitrary string, so a number is a
valid name. Even if you dont link to the anchor yourself,
adding a name will make it possible for others to link to it in
the future.
I belive anchors were initially designed to be two-way, but it
turned out to be more useful to link to headlines rather than
links, so links and link targets were seperated.
justsomehnguy wrote 1 day ago:
Wow, such a marvel of engineering, which is absolutely readable both on
my 4k landscape monitor and my portrait smartphone!
Does anybody knows, what CSS and JS magic did the guy used here?
RGamma wrote 1 day ago:
They use the very efficient noop framework. Go check it out here:
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
You joke, but the first web page came out in 1991. CSS wouldn't come
out into 1996, and JavaScript was 1995.
zilti wrote 1 day ago:
Technically, there was DSSSL already though. It is missed dearly.
tannhaeuser wrote 1 day ago:
Whoa, that was unexpected.
But technically, DSSSL (OpenJade) was used to render pages to
print/PDF and never ran as part of a browser stack (unless I've
overlooked some stubborn Schemer implementing it in JS or
emscripten or sth; but don't tell HN's Lisp fraction to given
them ideas ...) Unlike SGML itself, which is mentioned in TBL's
docs as the basis for HTML markup. Btw SGML does have its own
styling language in link processes which basically just re-uses
regular attribute declaration syntax, plus has some explicit
state machine representation (aka "links").
But yeah, using a Lisp derivative would've definitely prevented
the syntax proliferation that is CSS, its terseness/magic, and
habit of re-use of property names for different purposes as a way
to sneak in complex layouting features by understated surface
syntax changes.
Closi wrote 1 day ago:
That was the joke, donât worry we get it ;)
niemenmaa wrote 1 day ago:
Kinda reminds me of this saga (lots of foul language ahead)
- [1] - [2] -
URI [1]: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
URI [2]: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
URI [3]: https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/
Brajeshwar wrote 1 day ago:
Every webpages starts out responsive and adaptive by default. :-)
AlecSchueler wrote 1 day ago:
Without joking, it's the only page I've opened in a long long time
that was readable on mobile without lots of pinching and scrolling.
MrDresden wrote 1 day ago:
HN is pretty usuable, except maybe for some of the small touch
surfaces.
ainiriand wrote 1 day ago:
Sarcasm will not be tolerated.
sourcecodeplz wrote 1 day ago:
Kind of awesome that some of the websites from W3 Servers ( [1] ) are
still online, just a couple though.
URI [1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html
pasc1878 wrote 1 day ago:
I have found 3 with useful pages but half a dozen which just give a
blank page. And a few which are a copy of the 1992 web.
datascienced wrote 1 day ago:
First there was W3 then Web 2.0 then web3.
geuis wrote 1 day ago:
I also love that the original servers were written in a few lines of
C. We've come so far since then, in plus and minus ways.
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
I've seen web servers written in Maclisp (almost close to Emacs
Lisp and Common Lisp)
under ITS and PDP 10's.
URI [1]: http://up.dfupdate.se/httpd%20html
votiv wrote 1 day ago:
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
qingcharles wrote 1 day ago:
In 1993 I remember most of the web sites being "How to write HTML."
I see one guy there with photo.net -- and you might wonder why he
didn't register photo.com. In '93 basically every domain was
available, for free (there were no fees yet). Dotnet domains were
definitely seen as nerdier and more exotic and rarer beasts than
their dotcom brothers and the value of a domain was little
understood.
jaza wrote 1 day ago:
I remember the first time I ever saw the WWW, I think it was 1996, I
was in 5th grade (in Australia). The whole class sat down
cross-legged in the "computer room", where the school's brand-new
Internet connection had just been installed (was probably a single
14.4k modem). The teacher opened Netscape Navigator (on an Apple
Macintosh) and clicked on a bookmark. We all sat there spellbound,
waiting patiently. About half an hour later, the front page of
nasa.gov had finished loading! We all thought it was amazing.
CPLX wrote 1 day ago:
Havenât thought about IUMA in awhile. That might have been the
first site I went down the rabbit hole with.
DIR <- back to front page