A random rant

'Dot-com'. Haha. Of course the bubble burst. There are two reasons for the rise of the Internet, and two reasons alone. Sex, and Nuclear Warfare. Not communications. Not business, or e-commerce as it is now known. No, everything else was just a by-product of those two primitives. It was funny watching everyone coming to their senses when the stock market crashed.

One such by-product was the 'Web', common to hear it incorrectly referred to as the 'internet' by the ignorati... (I used a lowercase to distinguish the use it as a synonym for 'world wide web', from the global physical network infrastructure of communications known as the 'Internet')

A new term arose, 'Web 2.0', to refer to the big, popular and dynamic sites which survived the economic downturn - and the common features of how they have created applications which have attracted cult status, like Amazon, eBay and FaceBook, for example.

Remember when 'multimedia' was the biggest craze in computing? Well hyperlinking was also just coming into play around that time, and whilst it may have been conceived many centuries ago (TODO:citation needed) it was Tim Berners-Lee who came up with the idea of hyperlinking documents on computers scattered across the globe, using a browser to locate them via the http:// protocol over the TCP/IP network largely unknown back then as the Internet (now known as 'surfing'), which was already in use for remote logins, email, network file sharing, and so on. So the 'Web' is just another application on the internet, much as peer-to-peer filesharing and bit-torrents are new protocols and ways of doing things via the Internet (get the difference now?)

Enough, its late, and I want to get to the point: in true retro 90's style, here is a link to a page about the World's first webserver, and the man who invented the 'Web'. (the origins of the Internet go back decades earlier, to the days of ARPANET) It doesnt predict the future, or what things you'll be downloading or doing on it next.

It always, always boils down to one thing though: your pipe is too small.

=P

The Internet now

Here's what the Internet was like in June 2008, in terms of numbers of domains, web server platforms and so on: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2008/06/22/june_2008_web_server_survey.html

I should take an archive of that article - it shows the growth of the internet from the beginning of the 'dot-com' era, circa 1995-98, and it will make an excellent comparison in say 10 years now that IPv6 may begin to appear, and more importantly, more top level domains have been allowed (ie instead of just the usual .com, .net, .org, .mil, .gov, .edu , .info, .biz, and all the two letter country codes, we could have someone offering .xxx or .sex, and so on!)

Personally I think those domains are a good idea - what better way to declare a site that has adult content, which would make it easy to allow someone to choose whether to or not to block access to 'unsafe' content (great for parents, and offices who want to block that kind of surfing). Of course, it wouldnt work - too many people would circumvent it. Well, an infinite pool of monkeys.....

About me?

Well, I'm a web developer by profession now. I've been on the Internet since 1998, when I was a not-very-active member of the SUCS (Swansea University Computer Society). I remember Windows 3.1, and Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0. My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI99-4/A. (Parsec, anyone?) Well, no, that wonderful system belonged to my brother, James Grant. Eventually I had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum + 48K of my own, and a ton of games on tapes. Why anyone wanted a Mega Drive was beyond me, I mean the TI had the cartridges, AND it could be programmed? Games cost only £1.99 and £2.99 for the spectrum, with the odd blockbuster at £15-30. Who on earth wanted to pay £30-40 for each game? And what good is a system that can't be reprogrammed, eh?