Gah, unidirectional links? And the links point to fragile named resources rather than a single, stable, centralized database?<p>And if it ever <i>did</i> somehow manage to traction you'd never find anything -- it would require redundant databases with copies of EVERYTHING online. I mean, I know disk drives have gotten down to almost $1/MB, but the cost of that would rapidly become prohibitive.<p>This whole idea is absurd and has no future. Let's leave this stuff to IBM and the phone companies who already have the necessary experience and are rolling out OSI for us.<p>(all statements I remember from '91/92)
How ironic that, 25 years later, accessing this particular "link to information" requires running a Turing-complete language interpreter in a vastly complex piece of software consuming many orders of magnitude more resources than <i>an entire personal computer</i> would have at the time it was originally created. Yet the content remains the same plain text.<p>These alternative links should work for those using more... <i>period-appropriate</i> browsers:<p><a href="http://groups.google.com/d/topic/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/d/topic/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY</a><p><a href="http://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY/bJGhZyooXzkJ" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY/bJG...</a>
> We also have code for a hypertext server. You can use this to make files
available (like anonymous FTP but faster because it only uses one connection).
You can also hack it to take a hypertext address and generate a virtual
hypertext document from any other data you have - database, live data etc. It's
just a question of generating plain text or SGML (ugh! but standard) mark-up on
the fly. The browsers then parse it on the fly.<p>This was surprising to me. When people talk about the history of the web they make it seem like it was only intended for serving static documents, so reading Tim Berners-Lee talking about dynamic web pages in 1991 was unexpected.
This link from that 1991 thread is still available 25 years later: <a href="http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html" rel="nofollow">http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html</a><p>I'd guess it hasn't been continuously available, but certainly must be one of the oldest web links working today.
I is hard to believe how things have changed in the world 25 year later. I wonder I we will ever find something as transformative for our world as the www.
>Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your
existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and
making at least one link into your web from another.<p>Wouldn't that just make it part of the internet, though?
> At the other end of the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full text or keyword indexing.<p>Make that massive information providers may provide millions of powerful, dynamic HTTP servers with massive information storage, computational power, and links to millions of other powerful, dynamic servers, traversed by millions daily.
> The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data,
news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other
areas, and having gateway servers for other data.