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AnonTechie writes:
"For those of you who remember Gopher, Minitel, and Compuserve, the article is an interesting reminder of what once was, and for those born more recently a chance to read about a time before 'http' and 'www' had any meaning."
Twenty-five years ago, the World Wide Web was just an idea in a technical paper from an obscure, young computer scientist at a European physics lab. That idea from Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN lab in Switzerland, outlining a way to easily access files on linked computers, paved the way for a global phenomenon that has touched the lives of billions of people. He presented the paper on March 12, 1989, which history has marked as the birthday of the Web. But the idea was so bold, it almost didn't happen.
(Score: 2) by regift_of_the_gods on Monday March 10 2014, @03:54AM
Site owners need revenues. Maybe not SN, but all the big sites do, especially those with hundreds or thousands of employees. Some of them can sell merchandise or paid online subscriptions; most of the rest have to sell ads and/or visitor tracking data. In order for them to get the right amount of ad revenue (right amount = maximum amount possible, given the content and service they are providing), they need analytics and data mining, and often intersite tracking so they can really get a feel for what their customers are interested in. And since they're competing with TV and other sites, everything's gotta look good with professional design values, not the way the WWW was in the '90s (except for Craigslist). But hey, practically all of the content is still free.
I've often felt that I wouldn't mind paying extra for really good content and maybe a little privacy, but I've never gotten around to signing up for a subscription at wsj.com or nytimes.com or any of the others. I imagine their marketing managers run into that phenomenum quite a bit.