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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: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Monday March 10 2014, @05:37AM
My early impressions of the WWW were shaped by installations available to me at school. There were labs with Sun clusters, and labs with DOS. The Sun clusters had access to Gopher. The WWW was only available using a Lynx-like browser on DOS. In those days, there was a lot of material available on Gopher and Solaris was a very slick operating system. Even when Windows came out, it was way behind.
Thus, my early impressions of the WWW vs. Gopher were shaped by the systems upon which they were installed. I learned about all the early developments in those days reading USENET, and finding Gopher links. The WWW looked like an interesting little experiment; but I didn't enjoy it.
Upon graduation, I had to be weened off the university computer labs. I actually spent some time on free BBSs run by local hobbyists. Eventually I signed up for commercial Internet, but USENET and e-mail were still the killer apps. It was still DOS. Windows was too slow on cheap hardware, and systems capable of running Solaris was also probably out of reach for my money.
It wasn't until I was sitting in front of a Windows95 machine that the WWW started to "win". It seemed like GUIs based on X stood still while Windows got faster and faster. The era of "next year is the year of Linux on the desktop" had begun...
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