In 1991, I wanted to write about the WWW for NeXTWORLD magazine. Tim Berners-Lee replied to my email, saying he was reluctant to widely publicize that code for the web was available for free, as management at CERN had not yet agreed to release it publicly. The web grew slowly the first two years. At the time, I really didn't understand his hesitance, but in hindsight it was for the best. Two years ago, I wrote about the early days of the web on its 30th anniversary [0].
To me, Tim Berners-Lee is brilliant not just for his vision of a WorldWideWeb and its technical underpinnings, but also for an astute political streak in shepherding it to widespread adoption. I appreciate Jay Hoffmann (the article's author) for marking the significance of the anniversary.
Which, notably, is not made accessible via URL—at least not a "first-class" URL by the author/publisher; if you want to refer someone to the contents of a specific passage—or the entire book, even—then your best bet is with something like OpenLibrary, which has made it accessible in a fairly messy and roundabout way. Not a great endorsement for the vision of the Web as it was intended (vs how it is actually used).
For me as a kid, there was a huge gap between something that was free and something that was not. The difference between asking my parents for something and just getting (downloading) it.
I now have my own disposable income, but I still think long and hard in case I have to spend money; the actual price being secondary to the fact, that the thing is not free.
Yeah; I have the same reaction to products like Notion or Figma where someone is footing the bill to keep servers on. And if those servers ever turn off, I lose access to my stuff.
Either I'm paying for a product, and as soon as I stop paying, I've lost access to my stuff (Figma, Notion). Or the product is free, and someone is somehow intending to make money from me being their user. They'll either start charging down the line, or they're selling my data or my attention to advertisers (tiktok, twitter, etc).
I don't think I like using SAAS products because its never really free. At least not in the same way the web is free or vim is free.
It’s ok to pay money for things that are useful to you! Often most free alternatives have drawbacks or downsides of their own. Sure, there’s a chance they will eventually get shut down, but that almost never happens without warning. And it’s always a good idea to make backups of your important data for any kind of tool or service.
I think a lot of people in this community get caught up with “owning their own data” just in case, but in reality there are almost always ways to migrate your data when you need to.
In stark contrast to those 2 examples of Notion and Figma, consider Obsidian. With its massive OSS plugin ecosystem, it approximates their combined capabilities, but has a foundation of offline-first, local markdown files.
> Also I bucket "free" into "data harvesting", "actually gratis", or "libre".
Yes, and beware of the people who want you to ignore the second two categories. "If you aren't the customer, you're the product" is an insidious way to make you think there's no escape from being monetized, while simultaneously lying to you by saying you won't be a product if you pay using money. It's pretty universal that paying customers are a product sold to bigger customers, and I'm very wary of the motives of anyone who wants me to forget that.
Which is why, as a kid, I was fine with piracy. I couldn't have bought Photoshop in a million years, and back then there was no free for education or whatnot.
These days, I can afford it. Hell, I even bought Winrar as a thanks for many years of using it.
Same, we had so much more access to e.g. games (on different platforms); we didn't have the disposable income for consoles but we did save up for a PC and that basically launched my career.
On the other hand, that was an early indication of the entitlement that we have; we rail against the streaming services and resort to piracy not because it's unfair that they ask for money, but because we believe we're entitled to consume content. We're afraid of missing out, too.
And this is the real difference between him and Ted Nelson.
Nelson fantasizes about being the media mogul of a publishing empire under his technology. It's ultimately a proprietary format play.
This is the significant difference. I tried to explain it to Ted, personally, in Sausalito about 10 years ago over a lunch, as politely as I could.
You need to blow it open, as much as possible and make it as easy as possible without necessitating others to opt in. Information networks can't be built by an authoritarian conquer and covet strategy.
It's been tried countless times and history has zero successful test cases to study with that strategy. From DIVX to Flexplay, dvd-d to any format war ever, crippleware rent-seeking is a death knell. It will firebomb the most successful thing into oblivion overnight.
I failed to convince him this was the key difference. Ah well.
They're successful mostly because (many) end users ignore patents; at least the ones that don't work at large companies with dedicated legal departments (and targets on their back because they have actual money).
Further, that's why Vorbis, VP9, AV1 etc, show less adoption, even though they're free, for end users the other formats have been baked into hardware that only works with the closed ecosystems and the average guy can ignore the patents and continue to work with that non-free ecosystem.
I don't know if this counts though. It's not crippleware or control, it's a pretty modest nominal tax on a physical good (between 2 and 3%) that otherwise already costs money.
You could say the market pivoted away from things covered by the law into the area of the exceptions but that's a little too neoclassical for actual human behavior - I'd need to see significant direct evidence to support the idea that a 2% cost increase was both passed on to the consumer and the consumer made significant purchasing decisions from that price signal delta.
I'm going to guess that in practice, the 2% difference was absorbed in, for example, cheaper packaging, scaled manufacturing, permitting larger margins for QoS failures or by placing on cheaper areas of the distributor's shelf space as opposed to being directly transmitted to the actual consumer price of say $9.80 versus $9.99.
Even if it was directly transmitted, the majority of consumers aren't that discretionary with such small deltas. But this is another topic entirely.
Regardless, that's the only thing I can find that disputes my initial claim.
I was thinking about this as well, but in a more broad sense: Tim was able to execute on his vision so that he get the project going and useful very fast, postponing parts of his original vision (like editing, link and page discoverability ...) for later if necessary.
and it's the same reason why i believe micropayments in general will not be the disruption that many expect. sure some people may actually make an income that way, but many others won't. (just like some people make money through ads and many don't.
I know Ted's model here is a giant royalty ponzi scheme where you distribute things in rolling waves of fractional attributions but let's do something he hates and ignore that.
Instead it's people getting paid for content in the digital era.
You have substack, bandcamp, patreon and onlyfans - a similarly spirited but more simplistic version of Ted's system. His steps are just too big.
Glad to have him around though, he's a true gem.
I have a draft book "when brilliance goes awry" about half a dozen or so of these people I knew personally. I abandoned it after about 2 years or so because I couldn't figure out how to say, talk about John Draper in a way that I'd be comfortable with him reading it (I've been off and on acquaintances with him for about 20 years) and also me being as brutally honest as I want to be.
There's also so many brilliant engineers from the homebrew days that never made it out of the shadows like Steve Inness, who sadly took his own life. It's a palpable dynamic that needs documentation from somebody less autistic than myself
I mean hell, I was sitting a few feet away from John Warnock just last month at the University of Utah who talked about Steve Jobs #1 and #2 - a dramatic task of self reflection as an example of someone who came back from the wilderness. The talk is somewhere on youtube, it was run by IEEE for the 50th anniversary. I can't find his talk right now.
Ever wonder why we don't see as much Docbook around as we might? I mean, aside from its XML Hellscape? Whelp. Because a lot of the widgets in this "open standard" are tied to closed license tools.
Take //revisionbar -> //fo:change-bar-begin. Go ahead and try to run that through Saxon. Yeah, that's right, the Official Opentopia DocBook FO gives you an element that can only get processed into PDF via vendor FO processors. And those vendors are NOT cheap.
Crap like this fed the growth of web-based PDF engines like WeasyPrint, Vivliostyle, Paged.js, Prawn, and, on the paid side, Prince. Incidentally, making changebars with Asciidoctor and Paged is a frickin' snap, and you do it from git CLI instead of hand-coding every goddamn change bar.
(But wait! You can hire yet another closed source tool to do a docbook diff that inserts the markup that can only be interpreted by another closed source tool! SIGN ME UP)
We're not even going to touch the many, many, many XML specifications that ride on proprietary blobs in their own PIs - without which the XML is completely unparseable. Or dual mode validation with DTDs riding alongside schemas in delightfully undefined ways. Or . . or . . blabbity blabbity blah. Short version, whatever extra functionality was gained from XML publishing - and I'm not convinced there were any gains at all, even theoretical ones - was largely just not worth these sorts of traps. So today the whole ecosystem is today one that's largely based on government requirements and the starry-eyed consultants who love them. The rest of techcomm picked up lightweight markup or joined the Church of Madcap.
> In February of 1993, the University of Minnesota made an announcement. In specific commercial usage of the protocol, they would be charging licensing fees. Not large fees, and not in all cases. But, in some small way, they would be restricting access.
I remember gopher and thinking it was pretty useful and easy to use.
This decision by them seems to have been a monumental mistake.
I'm curious if anyone here knows who at Minnesota made this decision and why.
That, to me, is another interesting aspect to this story, but it is understandable people are more reluctant to talk about a failure than a success.
> In a time where we are having budgets slashed, it is impossible to justify continued (increasing) resources being allocated to Gopher development unless some good things result for the University of Minnesota. This is a fact of life.
Wow. What happened to publicly funded universities doing work to benefit all of mankind? They already had Gopher named after their team mascot, so PR value to the University would always be there.
I've seen government-funded universities trying to restrict and license their works a lot lately, and somehow assumed it was a new phenomenon. Perhaps I had an overly rosy view of academia in the past.
It's interesting to read the first link, but with DNS in mind instead of gopher. All the resource arguments still apply, and indeed DNS is not free, but equally also not expensive.
Now granted, DNS has a scarcity component, and if it was free it would basically be consumed by bots and be useless.
So back to Gopher. Which was going to license the server software (? - it's unclear, but appears to be targeting the server), and is that not the business model Netscape adopted?
Which was then subsumed by Apache and IIS?
So I guess I'm somewhat confused as to the actual benefit of the CERN "release" - (allowing others to create servers and clients?) - although clearly it may have been instrumental in gaining mindshare.
The brilliant piece of the web, the bit that was revolutionary, the bit that most web alternatives not only fail to implement but appear to be fundamentally unable to implement, because let's face it, this is a terrible idea. is the idea that one web document can load any other web document.
Hypercard is the common bogey man for a better web that failed, but in my mind the closest modern web alternative that failed to do this is the app store. now I know why the app model does not let you load arbitrary resources and you know why the app model does not let you load arbitrary resources, but in the right sort of light, if you squint the right way, you can see what may have been, how perhaps the exec() syscall may have taken an argument, a url, of what to exec.
Readit News
To me, Tim Berners-Lee is brilliant not just for his vision of a WorldWideWeb and its technical underpinnings, but also for an astute political streak in shepherding it to widespread adoption. I appreciate Jay Hoffmann (the article's author) for marking the significance of the anniversary.
[0] https://danielkehoe.com/posts/early-days-of-the-web-1991/
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/821987
seemed a really good overview/history to me and is one which I always recommend.
He certainly earned his prominent rôle in the Y2K celebrations.
Which, notably, is not made accessible via URL—at least not a "first-class" URL by the author/publisher; if you want to refer someone to the contents of a specific passage—or the entire book, even—then your best bet is with something like OpenLibrary, which has made it accessible in a fairly messy and roundabout way. Not a great endorsement for the vision of the Web as it was intended (vs how it is actually used).
I now have my own disposable income, but I still think long and hard in case I have to spend money; the actual price being secondary to the fact, that the thing is not free.
Either I'm paying for a product, and as soon as I stop paying, I've lost access to my stuff (Figma, Notion). Or the product is free, and someone is somehow intending to make money from me being their user. They'll either start charging down the line, or they're selling my data or my attention to advertisers (tiktok, twitter, etc).
I don't think I like using SAAS products because its never really free. At least not in the same way the web is free or vim is free.
I think a lot of people in this community get caught up with “owning their own data” just in case, but in reality there are almost always ways to migrate your data when you need to.
If you’ve some, do share those
Yes, and beware of the people who want you to ignore the second two categories. "If you aren't the customer, you're the product" is an insidious way to make you think there's no escape from being monetized, while simultaneously lying to you by saying you won't be a product if you pay using money. It's pretty universal that paying customers are a product sold to bigger customers, and I'm very wary of the motives of anyone who wants me to forget that.
These days, I can afford it. Hell, I even bought Winrar as a thanks for many years of using it.
On the other hand, that was an early indication of the entitlement that we have; we rail against the streaming services and resort to piracy not because it's unfair that they ask for money, but because we believe we're entitled to consume content. We're afraid of missing out, too.
So it's a bit of a mixed bag I think.
Deleted Comment
Nelson fantasizes about being the media mogul of a publishing empire under his technology. It's ultimately a proprietary format play.
This is the significant difference. I tried to explain it to Ted, personally, in Sausalito about 10 years ago over a lunch, as politely as I could.
You need to blow it open, as much as possible and make it as easy as possible without necessitating others to opt in. Information networks can't be built by an authoritarian conquer and covet strategy.
It's been tried countless times and history has zero successful test cases to study with that strategy. From DIVX to Flexplay, dvd-d to any format war ever, crippleware rent-seeking is a death knell. It will firebomb the most successful thing into oblivion overnight.
I failed to convince him this was the key difference. Ah well.
Further, that's why Vorbis, VP9, AV1 etc, show less adoption, even though they're free, for end users the other formats have been baked into hardware that only works with the closed ecosystems and the average guy can ignore the patents and continue to work with that non-free ecosystem.
I don't know if this counts though. It's not crippleware or control, it's a pretty modest nominal tax on a physical good (between 2 and 3%) that otherwise already costs money.
You could say the market pivoted away from things covered by the law into the area of the exceptions but that's a little too neoclassical for actual human behavior - I'd need to see significant direct evidence to support the idea that a 2% cost increase was both passed on to the consumer and the consumer made significant purchasing decisions from that price signal delta.
I'm going to guess that in practice, the 2% difference was absorbed in, for example, cheaper packaging, scaled manufacturing, permitting larger margins for QoS failures or by placing on cheaper areas of the distributor's shelf space as opposed to being directly transmitted to the actual consumer price of say $9.80 versus $9.99.
Even if it was directly transmitted, the majority of consumers aren't that discretionary with such small deltas. But this is another topic entirely.
Regardless, that's the only thing I can find that disputes my initial claim.
I know Ted's model here is a giant royalty ponzi scheme where you distribute things in rolling waves of fractional attributions but let's do something he hates and ignore that.
Instead it's people getting paid for content in the digital era.
You have substack, bandcamp, patreon and onlyfans - a similarly spirited but more simplistic version of Ted's system. His steps are just too big.
Glad to have him around though, he's a true gem.
I have a draft book "when brilliance goes awry" about half a dozen or so of these people I knew personally. I abandoned it after about 2 years or so because I couldn't figure out how to say, talk about John Draper in a way that I'd be comfortable with him reading it (I've been off and on acquaintances with him for about 20 years) and also me being as brutally honest as I want to be.
There's also so many brilliant engineers from the homebrew days that never made it out of the shadows like Steve Inness, who sadly took his own life. It's a palpable dynamic that needs documentation from somebody less autistic than myself
I mean hell, I was sitting a few feet away from John Warnock just last month at the University of Utah who talked about Steve Jobs #1 and #2 - a dramatic task of self reflection as an example of someone who came back from the wilderness. The talk is somewhere on youtube, it was run by IEEE for the 50th anniversary. I can't find his talk right now.
You need to be able to believe in a positive vision of constructive property-less mutual-aid Proudhon style anarchy to hop on board.
I'm totally willing to accept this is like <1% of people when it comes to their magnum opus.
But heck, you're never going to achieve exceptional things by behaving like everyone else. Embrace the spectrum.
Ever wonder why we don't see as much Docbook around as we might? I mean, aside from its XML Hellscape? Whelp. Because a lot of the widgets in this "open standard" are tied to closed license tools.
Take //revisionbar -> //fo:change-bar-begin. Go ahead and try to run that through Saxon. Yeah, that's right, the Official Opentopia DocBook FO gives you an element that can only get processed into PDF via vendor FO processors. And those vendors are NOT cheap.
Crap like this fed the growth of web-based PDF engines like WeasyPrint, Vivliostyle, Paged.js, Prawn, and, on the paid side, Prince. Incidentally, making changebars with Asciidoctor and Paged is a frickin' snap, and you do it from git CLI instead of hand-coding every goddamn change bar.
(But wait! You can hire yet another closed source tool to do a docbook diff that inserts the markup that can only be interpreted by another closed source tool! SIGN ME UP)
We're not even going to touch the many, many, many XML specifications that ride on proprietary blobs in their own PIs - without which the XML is completely unparseable. Or dual mode validation with DTDs riding alongside schemas in delightfully undefined ways. Or . . or . . blabbity blabbity blah. Short version, whatever extra functionality was gained from XML publishing - and I'm not convinced there were any gains at all, even theoretical ones - was largely just not worth these sorts of traps. So today the whole ecosystem is today one that's largely based on government requirements and the starry-eyed consultants who love them. The rest of techcomm picked up lightweight markup or joined the Church of Madcap.
I remember gopher and thinking it was pretty useful and easy to use.
This decision by them seems to have been a monumental mistake.
I'm curious if anyone here knows who at Minnesota made this decision and why.
That, to me, is another interesting aspect to this story, but it is understandable people are more reluctant to talk about a failure than a success.
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...
Wow. What happened to publicly funded universities doing work to benefit all of mankind? They already had Gopher named after their team mascot, so PR value to the University would always be there.
I've seen government-funded universities trying to restrict and license their works a lot lately, and somehow assumed it was a new phenomenon. Perhaps I had an overly rosy view of academia in the past.
Now granted, DNS has a scarcity component, and if it was free it would basically be consumed by bots and be useless.
So back to Gopher. Which was going to license the server software (? - it's unclear, but appears to be targeting the server), and is that not the business model Netscape adopted?
Which was then subsumed by Apache and IIS?
So I guess I'm somewhat confused as to the actual benefit of the CERN "release" - (allowing others to create servers and clients?) - although clearly it may have been instrumental in gaining mindshare.
That was an interesting read and exactly what I was looking for!
I wrote something about this long ago, but Jay did a great job narrowing in on the pivotal moment. https://tedium.co/2017/06/22/modern-day-gopher-history/
Hypercard is the common bogey man for a better web that failed, but in my mind the closest modern web alternative that failed to do this is the app store. now I know why the app model does not let you load arbitrary resources and you know why the app model does not let you load arbitrary resources, but in the right sort of light, if you squint the right way, you can see what may have been, how perhaps the exec() syscall may have taken an argument, a url, of what to exec.
A good gopher hole to visit to find recently-updated material is here: gopher://i-logout.cz/1/bongusta/
Using a terminal, the old lynx browser is probably the most widely available and user-friendly client.
If you want a GUI, Skyjake's Lagrange browser is beautiful and available for Linux, Mac, and Windows: https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/burrow-gopherspace...
(via OverBite: http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ )
and reading up a bit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
then dip a toe into the community forums.