The Web: 30 years of history, challenges and change
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The web started thirty years ago when a young British software engineer called Tim Berners-Lee invented a system for scientists to share information. Here we add some little known bits of history to the puzzle.
Click here to see the full blog post
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It was also Oslo that gave birth to two of the most influential browser engines.
I never knew this. That's fascinating. I wonder if the people involved in making those engines had any idea how they would end up - a great influential rise with the web of the 2000s only to be largely discarded in the latter 2010s.
as noted by all the domains that include ‘www’ in their name to this very day
Something which is starting to go out of fashion, I've noticed.
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@Gwen-Dragon said in The Web: 30 years of history, challenges and change:
Yes, and the WWW was a european invention.
True! On the flip side, here is something to consider.
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@ruario: Interesting that most of those companies were founded before 2000...
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Good memories of Netscape (R.I.P. but you can still download it, but without upport)
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@cqoicebordel: Well I guess it takes some time to get big
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I remember helping Opera a bit with broken websites (sending broken code to Opera (:cough: Google :cough:)) tested some of the browserjs.
As a kid not everywhere I went had internet access, and very few had dial up internet and those that did even fewer had a 2nd line for the dial up (can't use the phone while you are on the internet if dial up and the phone were on the same line).
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@lonm: I also didn't know that KHTML comes from there. I gave Konqueror a go for a while in a test Kubuntu install in the mid 2000s. It had a bit of a buzz in the "alternative to IE which is not Firefox" circles, but ironically I didn't find it interesting compared to Opera. Ha ha...
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Rocketing along at 28k?
Man, we had a DEC terminal with 800 baud phone handset modem connection at home!
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@mossman said:
Rocketing along at 28k?
Man, we had a DEC terminal with 800 baud phone handset modem connection at home!
Thinking about it, strictly speaking that was my dad's company intranet, not Internet.
First home connection for me would have been 4800 or 9600 baud to my student place around 1991. We already spent most of our time surfing Usenet at the faculties before that...
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@mossman when I looked for images of acoustic couplers (the term I couldn't remember in the previous post) the very first hit was... exactly what we had at home (even as dirty looking... LOL)!
Reading Wikipedia, it might have been 300 baud, not 800 baud!
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If we're going to wallow in nostalgia.... Although I had Internet e-mail since around 1994 (via the older BBS technology), I got onto the Web in 1996 when I built a computer to run OS/2 Warp 3. Warp included "IBM Web Explorer," which was my first browser. IBM ultimately scrapped Web Explorer in favor of a (buggy and dodgy) OS/2 version of Netscape (I think it was version 2).
Around 1998 I discovered Opera 2.12, whose installation file fit on a single floppy disk. Although it was still fairly primitive, the 16-bit version of Opera running under OS/2's Windows 3.1 subsystem performed substantially better than the OS/2 Netscape. I continued using Opera when I was forced to move to 32-bit Windows, I bought several versions before it became freeware, and continued using Opera until I got a wide-gamut monitor in 2007. That needed color management, which Opera didn't provide.
I switched to Firefox, which provided complete color management. When Mozilla pushed "Quantum" in November 2017 it broke several extensions I relied on, including one that provided a familiar "legacy" interface. If I had to get used to a new browser, that browser didn't have to be Firefox. But Chrome didn't seem a good alternative. I didn't like the user interface, and its color management wasn't reliable.
I had read about a new browser developed by the founder of Opera, and even tried out Vivaldi a year or so earlier. But it wasn't yet ready for prime time. It was "stable" by November 2017, so I tried it again. Much better than either Chrome or Firefox-- and it fully supported color management! Vivaldi has been my default browser ever since.
I wonder what the Web will be like 30 years from now. Will it be a sterile advertising platform dominated by corporate conglomerates, like television? Or will something perhaps replace the Web entirely by then?
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@trmarcus said:
(...) and continued using Opera until I got a wide-gamut monitor in 2007. That needed color management, which Opera didn't provide.
The 2 longest treads in the old my.opera forums:
Color management and encryption for mail. Both threads were way over 1000 posts over the years. Color management came in eventually with 12.50.1577, but mail encryprion? Well ... -