On Missing the Point (of the WWW)

I’ve been around since the very early days of the World Wide Web, I guess as one of the first thousand or so — certainly few thousand — users when it was largely just used for CERNLIB† documentation. It’s embarrassing that I didn’t appreciate the significance then, but perhaps that’s a useful lesson.At least I wasn’t alone.

The line mode browser seemed very primitive to someone who’d been doing networked hypermedia for some time with NeWS, partly by implementing one of the first two ‘hyperTeX’ systems I was aware of.Unfortunately not written up as far as I remember. The other was from Southampton, I think from Sebastian Rahtz’ time there, but I’m not sure he wrote it.

(Despite that, I do still use Lynx at times.) I also thought “haven’t they heard of Xanadu”.

So, I was misguided.

The important points about the web were actually the naming scheme and protocol (as well as being freely available, c.f. Gopher). Xanadu never went anywhere, though you could well argue that the WWW has gone to places it shouldn’t. Our NeWS system wasn’t really going to work outside our network domain (although that was extended to Strasbourg eventually), and NeWS got killed anyway.“Scott McNealey ate my window system” was the lament amongst NeWS hackers.