Yeah, it just blows my mind how fast technology increases and how something that seemed kind of a like a cool novelty has become so ubiquitous and necessary in today’s world.
I’m not sure when I first tried out Mosaic. I was on the internet in 1993, but accessing it using telnet, gopher, elm/pine (for emails), whatever the hell it we used to access usenet groups (I’m blanking), etc., from my university account. I was aware of something called the “World Wide Web,” but through accessing a menu item on University of Minnesota’s gopher server. Little did I know how quickly the world would change after Mosaic came out.
I remember being a bit irritated by it, for some reason, because now it was available to the masses and now any idiot could navigate the internet, and I sort of dismissed it as a novelty. Hey, I was 18 and kinda dumb. I guess I liked being part of a cabal who could navigate the esoterics of a text terminal to access the riches of the internet.
From my memory, it was around the summer of 1994 when it really started to take off. I was still playing my telnet Scrabble games back then from the university computer and accessing my emails using elm/pine, but I remember the terminals at the university starting to feature web browsers on them. Still, I felt it was more a curiosity than anything, but this is when I started thinking, hmm, maybe this will take off.
After that, though, I really can’t remember when it became completely mainstream, at least on the university level. I’m guessing it must have been that '94-'95 academic year for me.
Sockets did come from BSD, but way earlier and POSIX sockets are the same thing with another name.
I get you are a BSD fan, but for an init system, which is the real difference during the rise of the commercial internet, BSD really just means a distribution that uses an init system that is similar to AUTOEXEC.BAT
UCB putting it’s TCP/IP code in the public domain had more to do with anything than init systems did. The history of Coherent, Interactive, SunOS, OSF/1 SCO etc… is a mess obviously.
Minix is the most common version of a UNIX clone these days, with every modern version of an Intel CPU running it, but the more modern versions of POSIX are really where modern features come from. Java’s annoying inability for graceful restarts is due to quirks in BSD and SUN as an example.
It is funny that POSIX finally did end up working in the end given all it’s warts etc… but OpenBSD deliberately failing to comply in some cases is part of the reason it is a smaller segment of the install base.
I don’t care about this Ford vs Chevy debate and am good friends with some of the core OpenBSD developers but their instance on identifying with an old init system is problematic and even Apple didn’t copy it when they forward ported NeXT Step over the years.
Note that even if it’s aging userland (to avoid the anti-tivo licence clauses e.g. ancient bash without good error trapping on pipes) is based on FreeBSD, MacOS post 10.5 is POSIX complaint.
Microkernels are a solution looking for a problem, squeezed on one end by “modular monolithic” kernels like… well, all modern monolithic kernels, I suppose, especially ones like Linux which literally have loadable modules, and hypervisors on the other end, the final percolation of mainframe technology (VM, as in VM/CMS) down to commodity hardware. Heh… it seems the last gasp of microkernel relevance is people claiming that hypervisors are really microkernels, just ignore all that inconvenient history and their radically different designs, there…
The shell-script-based init system is called sysvinit but I get your point, and, while it’s appealingly simple, I do see the advantages of something a bit more… managed, I suppose. From my experiences with it (personal and professional) systemd is fairly good once you wrap your head around it.
BSD license, probably, not public domain, but the BSD license is so permissive it barely makes a difference once the Obnoxious BSD Advertising Clause is gone.
OpenBSD is so security-focused it’s bound to not make a huge number of friends, but that, at least, is respectable. They do important research for the rest of us.
(BTW, for all my defense of BSD in this thread, I personally use Linux at home.)
Nope, Berkley TCP/IP code was put in the public domain, the early BSD licence first appears in the 4.3BSD-Tahoe release but that is before the 4-clause version and that didn’t happen until 1988.
Same with me. The one thing I remember about early browsers was, the only non-text things they could do was to show images - and the earliest ones couldn’t even display more than one line of text to the side of any particular image. There was no need to handle video; after all, who had (a) an internet connection that could process a video feed, or (b) a computer, or a video card, fast enough to handle it?
Heh. In 1995 I spent several months in Germany as part of an exchange program*. I got to use a Silicon Graphics!!! computer, a brand whose whole concept was having a separate graphics card. It was superquick on the calculations but took forever and a year to draw the results Guess which part had they asked to get removed, in order to save some money :smack:
A German uni sent a German to the US and a US uni sent a Spaniard to Germany. Perfectly logical.
Heh I thought like this when aol cserve ect went to unlimited access before you could go to a random chat and itd be almost like the SDMB for conversations 2 weeks after aol went unlimited most of the people I knew left saying it was ruined cause the kids and idiots had invaded …………
I remember Mosaic, but I didn’t wind up using it that much. By the time I got it, other browsers were available, and I don’t think Mosaic had JavaScript.
I started getting online in 1995, but I started out with a Unix shell account (free from my school, after they bought me a modem for Christmas), and could only use text-based programs. While I did use the Web (using lynx), it wasn’t any more important than the other stuff, like gopher, ftp, telnet, and email. I downloaded a lot of stuff to try out on my computer.
When I got a 486, I did find out that they had slirp access on the Unix account I had. After making a script for Trumpet Winsock, I was able to get SLIP access, and finally use a web browser. But, like I said, there were plenty of choices by that time. I mostly alternated between IE and Netscape.
Eventually the school switched to a different server that had automatic PPP access as well as a shell account on the same number. And, for some reason, I do remember that PPP would sometimes not work, so I actually got a browser for use over a unix shell, that would download pages and images. It was weird.
I wanted to check on this and did some Googling. Unfortunately, nowadays, “Mosaic” in the context of web browsers/javascript refers to completely different stuff. How soon they forget.
Mosaic was the first web browser I used. It was installed on a single Mac LC in the 7th floor computer lab where I was a grad student at SUNY / Stony Brook. I didn’t use it for FTP – we had Fetch for that. I never used Gopher or newsgroups.
I remember lynx very well, but I don’t remember anyone actually using it for anything. I don’t even remember what sites worked well with lynx. My recollection was that if you were going to use lynx, you might as well access the page with Mosaic or Netscape.
I remember using Mosaic, then when Navigator came out, it was SO cool versus Mosaic.
The early pages were basically HTML-ified Gopher pages, or at least reminded me a lot of Gopher pages. Which makes sense, the immediate predecessor of the Web (i.e. HTML pages & browser) were Gopher pages over text-only interfaces.
It took a short while to start seeing interesting stuff- a lot of university student generated pages started, and a fair number of enthusiast pages from the wider world as well.
I keep thinking of “The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5” as being one of the first pages out there that I recall.
Commercial pages took a few years to really start showing up, and didn’t explode until the latter half of the decade (like 1996-1997-ish).
I used it and still do (as noted above). Some useful situations:
A very slow connection. Forget the images and all that, you just to Google something and get some text info.
Terminal connection. I run headless Raspberry Pis. I start off with a terminal connection to one, get some stuff going using text-only utilities like Lynx. Once things really get going I can switch to a Windowing environment if need be, popping up the windows from the remote machine on the screen of the local machine. (I’ve been doing that for … mumble … years. Since X10R3 for those scoring at home.)
People with certain limits, in particular blind folk. This is a really big thing and a very valuable contribution that the Lynx project provides. Unfortunately, despite laws and morals all too many websites have a “screw the handicap” mentality so Lynx doesn’t work well, if at all, on them.
Note that a web browser just isn’t an http program. You can use Lynx for ftp and a bunch of other protocols. If the protocol is basically text only, use a text only program.
I would argue that lynx is pretty bad for the Web now, as it’s far more visually oriented. I marvel that blind people deal with all the cruft.
But, back then? The Web was mostly text with links and some images as supplements. So a text only browser was fine. And, well, I didn’t know any different at the time, which might be why I didn’t use it much more than the other stuff.
Though I do remember that lynx let you send emails where you just typed in the From field, so I did use that. It did not open up pine, my email program. And I do remember wondering why we needed all the others when you could link to gopher, telnet, and ftp. (Gopher could do telnet and ftp at the time.)
The main thing I remember, though, is wishing I could use newsgroups, but my shell didn’t have a USENET program installed. And, even after I got SLIP/PPP, I never was able to get a USENET program working. I wonder if it was blocked.
When I first saw Mosaic, someone had it set up with a page linking to every other web page on the internet. The entire “web” was one page worth of links.
It’s grown a bit since then.
I used Lynx back in the day. It worked very well for web pages that did not have much graphical content, and was a lot faster than a graphical browser just because it didn’t bother to download images. There were a lot of horribly designed web pages back then with cutesy (aka annoying as all hell) dancing graphical images that were supposed to wow you. You could skip all of the cutesy annoying stuff and get right to what you needed with Lynx.
If you think Lynx and early versions of Mosaic are primitive, I first accessed the net on a 300 baud modem. I can type faster than a 300 baud modem can send characters.
Many web pages today are still badly designed (structure and appearance) and/or do not gracefully fall back to no images, no JavaScript, etc., as necessary. Fashion is fleeting, but (bad) style is eternal.
Besides everything mentioned thus far, more sophisticated search engines make browsing a lot more efficient than the early primitive ones or manually-curated pages. Too bad Google turned Evil basically right away (the most obvious sign was moving from .stanford.edu to .com and stopping publishing academic papers describing the algorithm).
I do remember being able to send emails not using pine or elm. I didn’t use lynx, though. I can’t quite remember what commands it was. Might even have been something as simple as “mail”, but I remember you were able to type in a mailto: and mailfrom: field and spoof the latter to your heart’s content as long as you were connected to a mail server that didn’t do some basic kind of authentication. It’s all rather hazy, but I do remember having to telnet to another university or use another university’s email server or something like that, as my university had some sort of basic checking on that.
I also remember being able to pipe the output of commands to other people’s terminals. You’d use finger to see who was online and what terminal they were assigned to, and you could type something like “banner ‘The illuminati are watching you’ >! /(directory name of their terminal)” and the output of your banner command would show up on their screen. You could pipe anything, even animated asciis to any arbitrary user on your server. It’s all a little hazy, so forgive me if I don’t have the technical words correctly, but I do remember pranking some people this way. Like I said, hey, I was 18.
I had a great animated ascii movie in my ~/.plan for when people fingered me which involved a cow walking over a land mine and being picked up by a box truck.
It only worked for people on modems and or terminals as a 56K line was too fast but it did stop people from poking into my status all the time.
Guess which part had they asked to get removed, in order to save some money :smack:
