ZDNet:
I used the Internet for years before there was a Web, but when Tim Berners-Lee proposed the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system, to his boss at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, we didn’t know it but we were on the brink of a revolution.
Berners-Lee’s idea wasn’t new. You can trace it back to Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think article in July 1945. Personally, I think Ted Nelson’s 1960 Xanadu hypertext vision had even more influence on how the Web would turn out. And, of course, Apple’s HyperCard did give us a hypertext system that might have beat Berners-Lee to the Web… except HyperCard was totally network unaware.
The door was open for Berners-Lee to turn the hypertext dream into our Web reality.
Hard to believe it wasn’t that long ago. Us old folks will remember what it was like accessing the internet before the World Wide Web. You kids nowadays don’t know the struggles we had using Archie, Gopher and Mosaic.
I remember it well, and I remember reading a story in MacWeek about this crazy new thing called the World Wide Web. I downloaded the Mosaic alpha and went to apple.com. Mind-blowing. I’ve lived on the web ever since!
I also remember Adam Engst writing a story for TidBits about how they were going to institute some limited sponsorship for their efforts–the very first web advertising. Nuts.
Not to mention the AOL disks spreading their blight through the mail.
If you’re going to include HyperCard, maybe a nod at the failed General Magic communicator is in order. Atkinson’s and Hertzfeld’s attempt to do hand-held communication.
Not to mention Lynx..
I used to have a thick stack (dot matrix printed!) of open FTP and Telnet sites for various things. Also having to occasionally use bang addresses for email, because DNS wasn’t everything yet…
Sigh… HyperCard. It always makes me sad to see that name, because it was a programming swiss army knife for the rest of us, it had a devoted group of users, and Apple (Jobs) killed it. The spirit of HyperCard lives on in LiveCode, and you can get a free version. But Apple will never see the need for something like that, when they think Swift is “easy.” No. HyperTalk was easy. And AppleScript is like HyperTalk, but awful.