There’s no doubt it’s a great piece of software, but I think saying it’s bigger than Gutenberg, or even the invention of the Internet itself is a bit hyperbolic. The Internet was already popular among academics in the late '80s and there were already graphical user interfaces for “online services” like Prodigy by 1989 and services like FTP, UUPC and the BBS system. A little later you had Archie, Veronica and Gopher which were widely used well before most people had any idea about the Web.
All the web really did was combine the GUI concept with the Internet Protocol and made it possible to link documents hosted on domains to documents hosted on other domains. No doubt this was a great innovation that helped make Internet use more mainstream, but even if TBL never invented the Web, somebody else would have invented something similar and the Internet was already growing quite fast.
Even as late as 1996 when tens of millions were online the Web only had a couple hundred thousand sites (compared to billions now) and was just one part of the Internet, it wasn’t until the late 90s that the Web became the dominant service on the Net.
The fundamental innovations were really the microchip itself and packet switching. The Web was just the cherry on top, yet most people erroneously think the Internet and Web are the same. No doubt it was important, but so was email, the search engine, the Border Gateway Protocol and the Domain Name System to an equal degree.
It just bugs me when people say “The Internet” was invented at CERN. There was already a global Internet by 1988-89 though IP didn’t become the universal protocol until well into the 1990s.
Though I guess it’s not as bad as thinking Al Gore invented it.
I agree that the Internet was the bigger revolution. If the WWW had not been invented, other interface(s) would have been developed to carry out much the same functions, but you could already do a lot on the Net with just email and FTP.
What the web and domain addressing did was hide all the mechanics that those of us who were on-line long before it had to deal with. That this was not as much as an innovation as the internet (and not as difficult) doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a revolution. By making the internet available to those who didn’t really know anything about computers it enabled the commercial revolution we see today.
And spam.
When I saw a URL on an ad on the side of a bus, I knew the world had changed.
This is true, but the tipping point to the technology is what made it easy for the general public to use it. That is when it really took off. In the 1980s most of the technology for using e-mail existed as it does now, but you couldn’t convince most people to use, or to even buy a computer. There was a “social media” back when it was just CompuServe and AOL, but this wasn’t as easy for people to use as something like Facebook.
WWW tied it all together. It was entirely transparent to the user if they were looking into different systems or not. So much so, that many stand-alone applications have been re-written to work in Web browsers because the user interface is so popular.
There was “social media” in the 1980’s too (maybe as far back as the 1970’s?), if you count Usenet at social media. The Internet was somewhat limited to the original backbone sites and other high-tech sites (givernment, military, universities, and some high-tech companies of the day), but access was already more widespread via UUCP and its dial-up phone tree system. I worked for two companies (as the Unix sysadmin) in the 1980’s that weren’t directly Internet-connected, but had UUCP and Usenet connections.
ETA:
We knew the world had changed when internet sites began to get commercialized and have advertising. There was a time when the very thought of commercializing the Net was considered blasphemous.
Just as there are now the occasional Dopefests, in those days there were the occasional Usenet parties, especially of the more social-oriented newsgroups like soc.singles. I once attended a large three-day-weekend party in and around the Bay Area (circa 1988 or so) that included a party in Berkeley, a day at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (they were having a showing of some of Will Vinton’s Claymation films that day ), and a beach party up in Marin. On the grounds of the Exploratorium there happened to be a volleyball net, so we all got together for a group photo of us standing in front of the Net.
I’d say AOL and Compuserve even before the Web were already doing that in the early 90s. But yes, I think Windows 95 including Internet Explorer could be thought of as the point at which the Net (and the Web) became truly user-friendly. Before that you had to use Winsock and other nerdy programs to access TCP/IP data.
There’s no doubt it’s a great piece of hardware, but I think saying it’s bigger than Gutenberg, or even the invention of the Internet itself is a bit hyperbolic. The smartphone was already popular among business people in the early '00s and there were already Internet enabled phones like IBM Simon in 1994.
All the iPhone really did was combine the ease of use of touchscreen technology and phone capabilities. No doubt this was a great innovation that helped make smartphone use more mainstream, but even if Apple never invented the iPhone, somebody else would have invented something similar and the Internet was already growing quite fast.
Even as late as 2008 when tens of millions had smartphones, the original iPhone only had 6 million sold (compared to over 700 million now) and was just one part of the mobile market, it wasn’t until the late 00s that the iPhone became the dominant mobile device.
The fundamental innovations were really the microchip itself and packet switching. The iPhone was just the cherry on top, yet most people erroneously think the Internet and Web are the same. No doubt it was important, but so was email, the search engine, the Border Gateway Protocol and the Domain Name System to an equal degree.
It just bugs me when people say “The smartphone” was invented at Apple. There was already a global mobile smartphone market by 2003.
^^^^(end parody)^^^^
From a technology perspective, WWW is not a huge revolution but from a usage perspective it was a game changer. It made connecting to other computers “fun” and webpages appear similar to other media like magazines and newspapers. It was easy to understand and use. Thanks to WWW, the Internet could appeal to the mass market in ways that the Internet alone could not. “Cool” is a hard concept to define, but WWW made the Internet cool. For no other reason, that makes it revolutionary.
It’s not overrated and it was a revolution. I’m also old enough to have been around “back in the day”, but even with AOL’s peak subscriber count of around 35 million plus the tech geeks or specialized companies who had access elsewhere (myself included), there are around 3 billion people with access to the WWW today.
It was and is influential: it helped support the global economy, new businesses, cultural globalization, and spread Americanism everywhere.
Very few things could compare to the printing press, but it is the modern equivalent.
It has so much impact that it permeates through the basic things in life, and we take most of the influences for granted.
Until the web came along, computers changed the way we worked but not the way we lived (except for enabling things like ubiquitous credit cards.)
Before say 1994, nontechnical people would ask me “Should I get a computer? Why?” My answer was to get one for the fun of it, if you’re so inclined, or for a word processor or spreadsheet if you had a use.
After about 1994, nobody asked or needed to. The answer was obvious. My parents in their late 70’s got a laptop a few years later.
The Web did that. At first it was a luxury, but it’s become a necessity, just like cars, TVs, and telephones. (Yes, I’m stretching necessity a bit.)
The printing press seems like a good comparison. There were books before the printing press, but they were fairly rare, and only in the hands of certain people, like the rich or academics, just like the internet existed before the web, but it was only in the hands of the few, like academics or otherwise nerdy people.
My father bought our first family computer around 1987. Being my father, he then kept upgrading it–better monitor, new video card, audio cards, more RAM, new hard drive, etc etc–until we finally got a new one in 1992. One of the upgrades he installed was a modem which he would use to dial into local BBSes and later CompuServe and Prodigy (Prodigy was there first service I was allowed to dial into by myself.) Along with the shareware games he downloaded and the conversations he’d have online, the computer was always filled with games, educational software, productivity software, various versions of Windows 3, etc. But the computer was never used in the way it is now, where I can spend an entire day loading nothing but a browser and not using it for anything else.
The WWW was big. Sure, it was and is basically an abstraction layer over the older internet, but it finally got rid of the walls. How long has it been since you heard the term “AOL keyword”? Something had to make everything interoperable and accessible to the general public.
The WWW makes the Internet into a modern automobile instead of a farm tractor. Well beneath both vehicles are combustion engines which were the real revolution.
I think narratives of instantaneous revolution are just sexier as stories. Before the iPhone came out, even a lot of “dumb” phones had various “smart” elements, such as Internet access and Web browsers.
I think people just prefer stories like “In the beginning there was dumb terminal cell phones, then in 2007 Apple came”, or “In the beginning the Internet was useless, then Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1990”. Same with the Berlin Wall - it makes for a much better story to say that “before people were horribly oppressed, then Hasselhoff and Reagan came and saved the day, and everyone ate french fries, drank Coke and lived happily ever after” than to tell the real story that the USSR was gradually losing its ideological influence as far back as the '70s, that Hungary opened its border months earlier, and that Moscow was fighting against change all the way up to the August Coup, 2 years after the Berlin wall fell. And that the last Russian soldiers didn’t leave Europe until 1994 (of course now they’re coming back).
Truth is things tend to scale up. Even the early Web didn’t have the search capacities or sexy interface we know it for until Mosaic and Webcrawler were released. Tim Berners-Lee definitely deserves far more fame than he has, but he was just one of many who made the Internet what it is today.
I didn’t really think you were old enough to remember life before the internet/WWW… the nerdier harder to use versions did exist in the 80’s, I used them a little but really not that many people were talking to other people with a computer in the 80’s. It seems a lot of people here at SDMB were but this is a population that skews to the more intelligent/more technical.
I think a better way to look at it would be to ask, try imagining life without WWW for a month or for a year… see what that looks like to give you an idea of how much we actually use it. How close it has us all to each other. I think people would adjust to living without it but boy we sure do use it a lot.
I think the radio/telephone are two pieces of technology that get left out of these Gutenberg vs the WWW debates. I think the radio/telephone was the first real step towards a global village… nothing like it existed before that, at all. To me the step between no radio/telephone to having a radio/telephone is even bigger than the step between radio/telephone to WWW. The ability to automatically connect with someone half way across the country or world is profound…
Yeah, I was born in 1990 so I was only about 11 months old when Tim Berners Lee first successfully demonstrated the Web that December (to surprisingly little fanfare, I might add). Though I’m still old enough to remember when the Internet was mostly just AOL and when owning a home computer was still a luxury. My dad got me on that sh*t young! I grew up in the Bay Area so computers already seemed like a fact of life by the mid-90s, but they were still pre-computer for most people in the world and to many in the US.
I think the computer communications revolution still would have happened without the Web, but it probably would have looked pretty different. I agree with you the telephone and radio (and TV which is really just graphical radio), along with the telegraph (which really was the first Internet protocol when you think about it) were a bigger step than the Web, which really just consolidated the pre-existing media into one channel. We’d still have cell phones, of course, without the Web.
), and a beach party up in Marin. On the grounds of the Exploratorium there happened to be a volleyball net, so we all got together for a group photo of us standing in front of the Net.