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saved by46 people, first byBoris on 2006-03-02, last byDan Holt on 2008-08-08

  • Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go
  • Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.
  • Although Nelson was polite
  • Nelson

    • We Are the Web 

      The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people.
      By Kevin KellyPage 1 of 5 

      Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.


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      Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.


      At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me - way too earnestly for a bar at 4�o'clock in the afternoon - about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he had plenty.


      Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.


      I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday. But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.


      Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

  • the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.
  • As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything
  • As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO,
    nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.
  • Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965.
  • the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965
  • Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965.
  • Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945
  • the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965
  • He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent.
  • Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext.
  • He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent.
  • But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.
  • Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse
  • about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity.
  • Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday.
  • I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday.
  • At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.
  • a hyperlinked world was inevitable
  • But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story.
  • The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.
  • ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of
    thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in
    history.
  • Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into.
  • It was going to save the world from stupidity.

  • Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the Internet did not exist for most people
  • In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: "It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals." Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: "THE INTERNET? BAH!"
  • It's not hard to find smart people saying stupid things about the Internet on the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: "It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals." Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: "THE INTERNET? BAH!" The article was written by astrophysicist and Net maven Cliff Stoll, who captured the prevailing skepticism of virtual communities and online shopping with one word: "baloney."
  • "I happen to know that the address abc.com has not been registered. Go down to your basement, find your most technical computer guy, and have him register abc.com immediately.
  • In fact, Wired offered a vision nearly identical to that of Internet wannabes in the broadcast, publishing, software, and movie industries: basically, TV that worked. The question was who would program the box.
  • on 2006-03-15 Fwctwmf
    How does this work?
  • on 2006-04-24 Hyamshart
    Positive Web 2.0 Article
  • on 2007-03-03 Mwesch
    the machine is us
  • on 2008-06-05 Mplourd
    Reminds me of Asimov's C/Fe model of human/robot interaction - Carbon/Iron (although I don't think Iron is the right element for the idea.
  • on 2008-08-08 Snehak
    Sounds good..would like to know more forms of Internet Viral Marketing
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