I'm sure there was more but I forget it
Sep. 12th, 2009 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoySo yesterday's XKCD gets me thinking: Nobody really predicted the web, did they? This is, I'm sure, an old observation - in fact I'm quite certain I've heard it before - but I'd like to make it anyway. You read science fiction from the days of the internet before the WWW, and their visions of the future internet seem to generally either be some ridiculous virtual reality thing, or the same as the internet of the time, except much larger. Nobody predicted the web.
Of course, I suppose that's sort of necessarily the case, as it seems the hardest step in developing the WWW was thinking of it; if some SF writer had thought of it, good chance someone would have tried to implement it earlier. I guess really what's worth noting is that once people started developing the web, nobody realized how big it would become, and that it would become the major driver of the internet's expansion.
...hm, OK, this is interesting - looking it up, the web's developers were inspired by Memex, an idea Vannevar Bush described in 1945. In that case, I guess it is kind of surprising no-one picked up on this earlier.
...yeah, looking this up even further, it looks like hypertext as we know it was invented in the 60s - but it all seems to be self-contained hypertext documents. You'd think that with the internet and the idea of hypertext coexisting for quite some time, someone would have made the connection earlier.
...OK, actually looking things up some more, it seems the internet doesn't go as far back as I thought; ARPAnet goes back to the early seventies, but other things like UUCP didn't come about till the late seventies, and Tim Berners-Lee already had some idea for some web-like (or really, wiki-like) thing called ENQUIRE back in 1980. So actually that wasn't much of a gap after all.
...I guess it's still worth noting that this sort of thing didn't appear in science fiction that I know of.
Totally unrelatedly, the internet connection here is quite inconsistent. I'm hoping once things get organized we can fix this? I'd like to start playing Kongai again...
-Harry
Of course, I suppose that's sort of necessarily the case, as it seems the hardest step in developing the WWW was thinking of it; if some SF writer had thought of it, good chance someone would have tried to implement it earlier. I guess really what's worth noting is that once people started developing the web, nobody realized how big it would become, and that it would become the major driver of the internet's expansion.
...hm, OK, this is interesting - looking it up, the web's developers were inspired by Memex, an idea Vannevar Bush described in 1945. In that case, I guess it is kind of surprising no-one picked up on this earlier.
...yeah, looking this up even further, it looks like hypertext as we know it was invented in the 60s - but it all seems to be self-contained hypertext documents. You'd think that with the internet and the idea of hypertext coexisting for quite some time, someone would have made the connection earlier.
...OK, actually looking things up some more, it seems the internet doesn't go as far back as I thought; ARPAnet goes back to the early seventies, but other things like UUCP didn't come about till the late seventies, and Tim Berners-Lee already had some idea for some web-like (or really, wiki-like) thing called ENQUIRE back in 1980. So actually that wasn't much of a gap after all.
...I guess it's still worth noting that this sort of thing didn't appear in science fiction that I know of.
Totally unrelatedly, the internet connection here is quite inconsistent. I'm hoping once things get organized we can fix this? I'd like to start playing Kongai again...
-Harry
