True. Thanks for the info about HyperCard. I just read up on the history of hypertext on wikipedia. And I didn’t know the exact history. I mean the question was, what if the WWW hadn’t been invented and not what if it was invented by somebody else and had a different name and architecture. So I didn’t include that in my answer. It’s certainly a product of its time. People were looking for a way to organize information and publish it on the internet. And Tim Berners-Lee didn’t come up with the whole concept of hypertext. Seems the concept was already there and libraries and people have been indexing and cross-referencing information before. It took someone to come up with the architecture and invent the markup language and the protocol. But it’s not that far fetched. It would probably have been done by somebody else if things had turned out differently.
I sometimes wonder how things were and felt back then. FTP is originally from 1971, TCP/IP was developed during the 70s and early 80s and they switched to the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) in 1983. SMTP (mail) was introduced in 1983, the NNTP (news) specification is from 1986, HTML was proposed in 1989 and the first browser being developed in late 1990, HTTP was introduced in 1991 and SSL was published in 1995. These are still around as of today (in revised, newer versions) and powering our world. There certainly also were precursors, competing and replaced technologies. So a lot of standardization happened especially during the 80s. In the early 1990 home(?) computers and storage got cheaper and more widespread (personal computers have been around since the 70s) and modems faster so more people could join the online services of that time. Other important tech of the early days that didn’t make it to today in their original form probably include UUCP, FidoNet, the whole dial-up BBSes and whatever ran on the ARPANET before the Internet Protocol got invented. But I suppose it was really different back then. Computer systems were big Unix machines and unaffordable to individuals. And a select few universities were connected, initially funded by the department of defense.
True. Thanks for the info about HyperCard. I just read up on the history of hypertext on wikipedia. And I didn’t know the exact history. I mean the question was, what if the WWW hadn’t been invented and not what if it was invented by somebody else and had a different name and architecture. So I didn’t include that in my answer. It’s certainly a product of its time. People were looking for a way to organize information and publish it on the internet. And Tim Berners-Lee didn’t come up with the whole concept of hypertext. Seems the concept was already there and libraries and people have been indexing and cross-referencing information before. It took someone to come up with the architecture and invent the markup language and the protocol. But it’s not that far fetched. It would probably have been done by somebody else if things had turned out differently.
I sometimes wonder how things were and felt back then. FTP is originally from 1971, TCP/IP was developed during the 70s and early 80s and they switched to the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) in 1983. SMTP (mail) was introduced in 1983, the NNTP (news) specification is from 1986, HTML was proposed in 1989 and the first browser being developed in late 1990, HTTP was introduced in 1991 and SSL was published in 1995. These are still around as of today (in revised, newer versions) and powering our world. There certainly also were precursors, competing and replaced technologies. So a lot of standardization happened especially during the 80s. In the early 1990 home(?) computers and storage got cheaper and more widespread (personal computers have been around since the 70s) and modems faster so more people could join the online services of that time. Other important tech of the early days that didn’t make it to today in their original form probably include UUCP, FidoNet, the whole dial-up BBSes and whatever ran on the ARPANET before the Internet Protocol got invented. But I suppose it was really different back then. Computer systems were big Unix machines and unaffordable to individuals. And a select few universities were connected, initially funded by the department of defense.