The open web (part 1/3)
The ghost of Christmas past
The web is making me feel old.
It happens to everyone. You look around, and you feel old. What once inspired strong feelings, suddenly is not inspiring any more.
The web fall into normal is making me feel old.
My first contact with the web was back in the initial days. Gopher was pretty much alive. The web as an infant. An ugly infant with gray background pages, the clunky mosaic browser and dog slow internet connections.
My first contact with the web was unforgettable. I was in my father’s office, waiting for a ride home. I was looking for a game on his PC to pass the time, and I opened Mosaic. For a good half-hour I was amazed at how much stuff, and how much interesting stuff my dad had on his PC.Then it dawned on me. Those pages were not on his computer, they were everywhere! Written by absolutely anyone!
The web feels normal today not because it’s no longer amazing, but rather because of how utterly astonishing it felt back then.
The more I dug about the internet, its RFCs, its protocols, foundations, applications and pieces, the more amazed I was. This was a chaotic mish mash of layers upon layers of software, all described and implemented with little care to the end-game.
The drive for incremental innovations seemed to be: what can we do with this network that has not yet been done?
Everyone knows the end-game is money making. Those fools!
I need to contact someone: poof, email appears. That someone may not be online now: zap, email becomes store and forward. I need to transfer large files between hosts: here comes FTP. I want to see if all that hyperlinking theory is somehow useful: HTML comes along.
Did any of these creators get rich with these amazing feats? Not one. At least, not from commercial exploration of those amazing technological feats.
It is this awe at what Humanity, with capital H, was building, that I miss. I don’t see the same builder ethos any more.
When you can’t find the same juvenile awe and strong feelings of yesteryear, you can’t avoid feeling old.I am older, but it is not my age that makes me feel old. It is the web.
The web is making me feel old.
(my old man ramblings continue on part 2)
