Discussion:
[ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that developed Mosaic & HTTPd?
Miles Fidelman
2018-03-11 00:17:16 UTC
Permalink
Hi Folks,

I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?

I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
time, so to speak.

Any insights?

Thanks,

Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Vint Cerf
2018-03-11 00:51:46 UTC
Permalink
you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
(and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
1994.

vint
Post by Miles Fidelman
Hi Folks,
I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
time, so to speak.
Any insights?
Thanks,
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
--
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
Brian E Carpenter
2018-03-11 01:38:13 UTC
Permalink
I see that Marc did an oral history interview as early as 1995:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about NCSA management.

Also he was interviewed for this (as well as Vint):
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807

In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a whole lot.

Regards
Brian
Post by Vint Cerf
you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
(and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
1994.
vint
Post by Miles Fidelman
Hi Folks,
I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
time, so to speak.
Any insights?
Thanks,
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
Miles Fidelman
2018-03-12 16:05:19 UTC
Permalink
Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the oral
and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization &
players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.

I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates that
spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the workers. 
How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to
TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts that led to
the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual
subsumption by today's web.

A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal knowledge
of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less
visible.  IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPd, the
HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher, replaced by
something even newer and shinier. Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the
web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."  I'd kind of
like to understand the environment in which that happened.

By analogy.  Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both at BBN,
and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.  We all know the story
of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.  The
environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various
personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late" and some
of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known about the
next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail systems for
various O/S environments.

Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA? (There's a
timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but it's all
kind of sketchy.)

Cheers,

Miles
Post by Brian E Carpenter
http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about NCSA management.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a whole lot.
Regards
Brian
Post by Vint Cerf
you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
(and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
1994.
vint
Post by Miles Fidelman
Hi Folks,
I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
time, so to speak.
Any insights?
Thanks,
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Jack Haverty
2018-03-12 17:32:12 UTC
Permalink
Hi Miles,

In dissecting "organizational histories ... motivations", it might be
interesting to look at the financial aspects - not only who paid for
what and when, but what benefit did they expect to get in return, wnd when.

It's the old adage - Follow The Money. IMHO, somewhere along the
timeline from the 60s to today, the climate switched from a largely
technical focus (how can we make this work?) to a largely financial
focus (how can we make money out of this?). That, IMHO, dictated the
development of what we have today far more than technical merits.

I remember, back in the early 90s, that you had to pay for a license to
use a browser. That may have been a pivotal historical event, when IIRC
"apps" beforehand had been free to FTP.

/Jack
Post by Miles Fidelman
Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the oral
and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization &
players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.
I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates that
spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the workers. 
How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to
TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts that led to
the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual
subsumption by today's web.
A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal knowledge
of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less
visible.  IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPd, the
HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher, replaced by
something even newer and shinier. Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the
web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."  I'd kind of
like to understand the environment in which that happened.
By analogy.  Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both at BBN,
and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.  We all know the story
of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.  The
environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various
personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late" and some
of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known about the
next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail systems for
various O/S environments.
Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA? (There's a
timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but it's all
kind of sketchy.)
Cheers,
Miles
Post by Brian E Carpenter
http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about NCSA management.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a whole lot.
Regards
Brian
Post by Vint Cerf
you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
(and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
1994.
vint
Post by Miles Fidelman
Hi Folks,
I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
time, so to speak.
Any insights?
Thanks,
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
Brian E Carpenter
2018-03-12 19:17:40 UTC
Permalink
Post by Miles Fidelman
Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the oral
and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization &
players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.
I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates that
spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the workers.
The managers? Most of them had no idea. At CERN, Mike Sendall (Tim's
group leader) and David Williams (deputy division leader, later the
actual division leader) both stated later that their main contribution to
the web was not stopping the project, which was unfunded and unauthorised.
Somebody paid for a couple of NeXts but I'm pretty sure that was for
some other project. Please read the Gilles and Cailliau book for details.

The first server in the US was set up by Paul Kunz at SLAC. As far as I
know he did it because he wanted to, not because anybody approved it.
That was ceratinly Paul's style. I believe the second server in the US was
set up by David Martin at Fermilab. Ask him (he's at Argonne now, ***@alcf.anl.gov).

A management culture of not interfering with smart people was the key.
Classical skunk works.
Post by Miles Fidelman
How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to
TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts that led to
the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual
subsumption by today's web.
A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal knowledge
of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less
visible.  IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPd, the
HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher, replaced by
something even newer and shinier.
In 1992, Tim knew that a good browser was the key and he worked on stimulating
that. If it hadn't been Mosaic in late 1992, it would have been something else
in 1993, I think. Single-ended hyperlinks really provided a more powerful
paradigm than gopher, WAIS or Archie which were the main alternatives.
Post by Miles Fidelman
Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the
web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."  I'd kind of
like to understand the environment in which that happened.
The Jim Clark book answers that. It's rather self-serving, but it was because
Jim was an experienced entrepreneur and ran into Andreesen that Netscape
became "industrial". NSCA management was a hindrance, not a help. They
didn't get out of the way.
Post by Miles Fidelman
By analogy.  Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both at BBN,
and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.
I'm not sure the analogy holds. NCSA doesn't seem to have operated
as a skunk works, and they viewed networking as a form of plumbing.
I get the feeling that Mosaic was a bit of an outlier in their history;
NSFnet and bandwidth was the main story.

1997 interview with Larry Smarr: https://vimeo.com/6982439

Brian
Post by Miles Fidelman
We all know the story
of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.  The
environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various
personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late" and some
of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known about the
next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail systems for
various O/S environments.
Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA? (There's a
timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but it's all
kind of sketchy.)
Cheers,
Miles
Post by Brian E Carpenter
http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about NCSA management.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a whole lot.
Regards
Brian
Post by Vint Cerf
you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
(and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
1994.
vint
Post by Miles Fidelman
Hi Folks,
I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
time, so to speak.
Any insights?
Thanks,
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
Vint Cerf
2018-03-12 19:52:45 UTC
Permalink
I am with Brian on this. Maybe you should contact Larry Smarr? he headed
NCSA at the time.
Of course the 20-20 back vision may prove to be a distorted view of
history.

I will see Larry in the next month or so but sounds like you'd like a more
immediate response?

v


On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 3:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Miles Fidelman
Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the oral
and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization &
players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.
I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates that
spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the workers.
The managers? Most of them had no idea. At CERN, Mike Sendall (Tim's
group leader) and David Williams (deputy division leader, later the
actual division leader) both stated later that their main contribution to
the web was not stopping the project, which was unfunded and unauthorised.
Somebody paid for a couple of NeXts but I'm pretty sure that was for
some other project. Please read the Gilles and Cailliau book for details.
The first server in the US was set up by Paul Kunz at SLAC. As far as I
know he did it because he wanted to, not because anybody approved it.
That was ceratinly Paul's style. I believe the second server in the US was
A management culture of not interfering with smart people was the key.
Classical skunk works.
Post by Miles Fidelman
How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to
TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts that led to
the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual
subsumption by today's web.
A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal knowledge
of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less
visible. IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPd, the
HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher, replaced by
something even newer and shinier.
In 1992, Tim knew that a good browser was the key and he worked on stimulating
that. If it hadn't been Mosaic in late 1992, it would have been something else
in 1993, I think. Single-ended hyperlinks really provided a more powerful
paradigm than gopher, WAIS or Archie which were the main alternatives.
Post by Miles Fidelman
Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the
web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength." I'd kind of
like to understand the environment in which that happened.
The Jim Clark book answers that. It's rather self-serving, but it was because
Jim was an experienced entrepreneur and ran into Andreesen that Netscape
became "industrial". NSCA management was a hindrance, not a help. They
didn't get out of the way.
Post by Miles Fidelman
By analogy. Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both at BBN,
and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.
I'm not sure the analogy holds. NCSA doesn't seem to have operated
as a skunk works, and they viewed networking as a form of plumbing.
I get the feeling that Mosaic was a bit of an outlier in their history;
NSFnet and bandwidth was the main story.
1997 interview with Larry Smarr: https://vimeo.com/6982439
Brian
Post by Miles Fidelman
We all know the story
of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email. The
environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various
personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late" and some
of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known about the
next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail systems for
various O/S environments.
Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA? (There's a
timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but it's all
kind of sketchy.)
Cheers,
Miles
Post by Brian E Carpenter
http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about
NCSA management.
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a
whole lot.
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Regards
Brian
Post by Vint Cerf
you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA
project
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project
that
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then
CEO of
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric
Bina
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
(and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape
Communications in
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
1994.
vint
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman <
Post by Miles Fidelman
Hi Folks,
I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at
NCSA
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
Post by Miles Fidelman
that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked
for?
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
Post by Miles Fidelman
I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
time, so to speak.
Any insights?
Thanks,
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
--
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
Paul Vixie
2018-03-12 21:31:24 UTC
Permalink
Post by Brian E Carpenter
...
The first server in the US was set up by Paul Kunz at SLAC. As far as I
know he did it because he wanted to, not because anybody approved it.
everywhere i worked in the 1980's we hid our internet related costs in
the phone bill and stonewalled the auditors if any. i remember the day
brian reid told me to list gatekeeper.dec.com in my budget request for
the coming year, and i remember thinking, wow, how far we have come. he
and richard johnsson had been skunkworking it for years before i arrived.

i think this informs us not just about the history of the internet and
the nature of disruptive innovation, but something dark about human nature.
--
P Vixie
Brian E Carpenter
2018-03-11 01:26:57 UTC
Permalink
As a starting point, try
* Chapter 7 of "How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web", James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, Oxford University Press, 2000.

There are also a few hints in:
* Chapter 3 of "Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft", Jim Clark with Owen Edwards, St Martins Press, 1999.
* Chapter 6 of "Weaving the Web", Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, HarperCollins, 1999.

My impression is that, like the original server and browsers at CERN, this was a samizdat project mainly unknown to the management. Jim Clark is quite rude about NCSA management, in fact. The original http daemon was from CERN in any case (http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html).

Regards
Brian
Post by Miles Fidelman
Hi Folks,
I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
time, so to speak.
Any insights?
Thanks,
Miles Fidelman
Stephane Bortzmeyer
2018-03-11 20:37:09 UTC
Permalink
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
Post by Miles Fidelman
Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
not just a reading one).
Jack Haverty
2018-03-11 23:02:14 UTC
Permalink
Good point, but I'd make a stronger distinction. TBL's vision, and the
implementation, was of a collaborative mechanism, where all the members
of the web would both produce and consume information - "authoring" and
"reading" in a collaborative environment of geographically dispersed
colleagues. The protocol had both "GET" and "PUT" primitives.

When I first encountered the CERN code sometime in 1991 or so, I
downloaded it and got it running. My immediate reaction was "Wow.
Finally someone has come up with the next 'killer app'." The "network
community" had been trying to go beyond the classic workhorses of
Telnet/FTP/Mail for 20 years, but the innovation that has endured came
from the "user community" of physicists.

But when the idea migrated elsewhere, starting probably with Mosaic, it
somehow lost the "producer" focus and became a mechanism primarily for
consuming material that was prepared in some 'offline' manner.

That has changed somewhat over time, but the focus still seems to be
consumption, not production -- browsing, rather than collaboration.
There are collaborative mechanisms (I personally like Mediawiki), but
IMHO the dominant usage is still consumption. Production seems to have
moved to social media, where the structure of the collaboration is set
by the corporations rather than the users.

/Jack Haverty
Post by Stephane Bortzmeyer
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
Post by Miles Fidelman
Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
not just a reading one).
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
John Day
2018-03-11 23:21:17 UTC
Permalink
My understanding (from afar) was that the ‘producers’ for Mosaic were the supercomputer apps that were generating lots of data and they needed a tool to facilitate managing it. There was a need at NCSA for something like what Mosaic was.
Post by Jack Haverty
Good point, but I'd make a stronger distinction. TBL's vision, and the
implementation, was of a collaborative mechanism, where all the members
of the web would both produce and consume information - "authoring" and
"reading" in a collaborative environment of geographically dispersed
colleagues. The protocol had both "GET" and "PUT" primitives.
When I first encountered the CERN code sometime in 1991 or so, I
downloaded it and got it running. My immediate reaction was "Wow.
Finally someone has come up with the next 'killer app'." The "network
community" had been trying to go beyond the classic workhorses of
Telnet/FTP/Mail for 20 years, but the innovation that has endured came
from the "user community" of physicists.
But when the idea migrated elsewhere, starting probably with Mosaic, it
somehow lost the "producer" focus and became a mechanism primarily for
consuming material that was prepared in some 'offline' manner.
That has changed somewhat over time, but the focus still seems to be
consumption, not production -- browsing, rather than collaboration.
There are collaborative mechanisms (I personally like Mediawiki), but
IMHO the dominant usage is still consumption. Production seems to have
moved to social media, where the structure of the collaboration is set
by the corporations rather than the users.
/Jack Haverty
Post by Stephane Bortzmeyer
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
Post by Miles Fidelman
Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
not just a reading one).
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
Dave Crocker
2018-03-12 01:35:55 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jack Haverty
But when the idea migrated elsewhere, starting probably with Mosaic, it
somehow lost the "producer" focus and became a mechanism primarily for
consuming material that was prepared in some 'offline' manner.
Remember that for a time, gopher was very stiff competition for the web.

Poor IPR and management policies by one side or the other, gopher had
the major advantage of being usable with existing txt documents while
the early web /required/ html and the tools for producing them were few
and poor. That gave gopher a much larger cache of documents to share.
Initially.

d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
Miles Fidelman
2018-03-12 15:45:57 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dave Crocker
Post by Jack Haverty
But when the idea migrated elsewhere, starting probably with Mosaic, it
somehow lost the "producer" focus and became a mechanism primarily for
consuming material that was prepared in some 'offline' manner.
Remember that for a time, gopher was very stiff competition for the web.
Poor IPR and management policies by one side or the other, gopher had
the major advantage of being usable with existing txt documents while
the early web /required/ html and the tools for producing them were few
and poor. That gave gopher a much larger cache of documents to share.
Initially.
d/
Of course, from almost the beginning, Mosaic and future browsers
supported gopher:: URLs.  I used to host a bunch of gopher servers, and
when we did our project installing Internet in the Cambridge Public
Library (1st ever, high speed Internet in a public library!!!) - we set
up the machines with Mosaic as the primary GUI, with links to things
like the WWW Public Library - but an awful lot of the resources we
linked to were gopher servers.

Re. losing the "producer" flavor... a lot of that went away when Mozilla
stopped shipping with a built in WYSIWYG web composer. But.. there was
always the conflict that one had to have somewhere to "publish" stuff. 
In academia, that was often one's personal workstation, or the
department server - but for everyone else, not a lot of people had write
access to a gopher or web server.  Nowadays, laptops come with built in
servers - but no composers, and it's kind of hard to publish from behind
a NAT router.  Hosted WordPress seems to have become the vehicle for a
rather huge amount of publishing to the web.

Miles
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Brian E Carpenter
2018-03-11 22:56:24 UTC
Permalink
Post by Stephane Bortzmeyer
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
Post by Miles Fidelman
Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
not just a reading one).
The problem was that it only ran on a NeXt, which was a marvellous device
that failed in the market. But certainly, in the High Energy Physics world
it was of course the CERN server and client code that was installed and
used first. On the other hand, Tim immediately saw the advantage of Mosaic
at that time, when Unix and X-windows were growing like mushrooms. It was
Tim personally who showed me Mosaic (on my NCD connected to CERNVAX) and
within a day Jean-Michel Jouanigot had it running on our group server
(dxcoms.cern.ch for those with long memories).

Brian
Steve Bunch
2018-03-12 01:11:53 UTC
Permalink
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Stephane Bortzmeyer
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
Post by Miles Fidelman
Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
not just a reading one).
The problem was that it only ran on a NeXt, which was a marvellous device
that failed in the market. But certainly, in the High Energy Physics world
it was of course the CERN server and client code that was installed and
used first. On the other hand, Tim immediately saw the advantage of Mosaic
at that time, when Unix and X-windows were growing like mushrooms. It was
Tim personally who showed me Mosaic (on my NCD connected to CERNVAX) and
within a day Jean-Michel Jouanigot had it running on our group server
(dxcoms.cern.ch for those with long memories).
Mosaic used X Windows, available on any UNIX system of the time. Eric Bina, who wrote much of Mosaic, worked on our X Windows team at the Motorola Computer Group facility in Champaign-Urbana for a couple of years before going across town to NCSA, and X Windows and graphics were second nature to him.

We should never underestimate the power of “ease of diffusion” in whether or how fast something gets adopted. A lot of truly great ideas die on the vine of an exotic plant when it goes extinct, while less-stellar ideas live on because the software was free and easy to port.

Steve
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Brian
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http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
Miles Fidelman
2018-03-13 00:50:16 UTC
Permalink
Actually, speed doesn't matter all that much - but his contact info is
online, so I'll just reach out.  Thanks guys!
Post by Vint Cerf
I am with Brian on this. Maybe you should contact Larry Smarr? he
headed NCSA at the time.
Of course the 20-20 back vision may prove to be a distorted view of
history.
I will see Larry in the next month or so but sounds like you'd like a
more immediate response?
v
On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 3:17 PM, Brian E Carpenter
Post by Miles Fidelman
Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the
oral
Post by Miles Fidelman
and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization &
players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.
I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates
that
Post by Miles Fidelman
spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the
workers.
The managers? Most of them had no idea. At CERN, Mike Sendall (Tim's
group leader) and David Williams (deputy division leader, later the
actual division leader) both stated later that their main
contribution to
the web was not stopping the project, which was unfunded and
unauthorised.
Somebody paid for a couple of NeXts but I'm pretty sure that was for
some other project. Please read the Gilles and Cailliau book for
details.
The first server in the US was set up by Paul Kunz at SLAC. As far
as I
know he did it because he wanted to, not because anybody approved it.
That was ceratinly Paul's style. I believe the second server in
the US was
set up by David Martin at Fermilab. Ask him (he's at Argonne now,
A management culture of not interfering with smart people was the key.
Classical skunk works.
Post by Miles Fidelman
How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to
TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts
that led to
Post by Miles Fidelman
the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual
subsumption by today's web.
A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal
knowledge
Post by Miles Fidelman
of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less
visible.  IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA
HTTPd, the
Post by Miles Fidelman
HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher,
replaced by
Post by Miles Fidelman
something even newer and shinier.
In 1992, Tim knew that a good browser was the key and he worked on
stimulating
that. If it hadn't been Mosaic in late 1992, it would have been
something else
in 1993, I think. Single-ended hyperlinks really provided a more
powerful
paradigm than gopher, WAIS or Archie which were the main alternatives.
Post by Miles Fidelman
Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the
web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."  I'd kind of
like to understand the environment in which that happened.
The Jim Clark book answers that. It's rather self-serving, but it
was because
Jim was an experienced entrepreneur and ran into Andreesen that
Netscape
became "industrial". NSCA management was a hindrance, not a help. They
didn't get out of the way.
Post by Miles Fidelman
By analogy.  Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both
at BBN,
Post by Miles Fidelman
and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.
I'm not sure the analogy holds. NCSA doesn't seem to have operated
as a skunk works, and they viewed networking as a form of plumbing.
I get the feeling that Mosaic was a bit of an outlier in their
history;
NSFnet and bandwidth was the main story.
1997 interview with Larry Smarr: https://vimeo.com/6982439
    Brian
Post by Miles Fidelman
We all know the story
of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.  The
environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various
personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late"
and some
Post by Miles Fidelman
of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known
about the
Post by Miles Fidelman
next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail
systems for
Post by Miles Fidelman
various O/S environments.
Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA?
(There's a
Post by Miles Fidelman
timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but
it's all
Post by Miles Fidelman
kind of sketchy.)
Cheers,
Miles
Post by Brian E Carpenter
http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
<http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html>
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank
about NCSA management.
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807>
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen"
finds a whole lot.
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Regards
     Brian
Post by Vint Cerf
you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an
NCSA project
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks
project that
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark,
then CEO of
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen
and Eric Bina
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
(and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape
Communications in
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
1994.
vint
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman
Post by Miles Fidelman
Hi Folks,
I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the
group at NCSA
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
Post by Miles Fidelman
that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the
organization
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
Post by Miles Fidelman
chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually
worked for?
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
Post by Miles Fidelman
I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the
enabled the
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
Post by Miles Fidelman
folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready
for prime
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
Post by Miles Fidelman
time, so to speak.
Any insights?
Thanks,
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
<http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
for assistance.
Post by Miles Fidelman
Post by Brian E Carpenter
Post by Vint Cerf
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
<http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
for assistance.
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
<http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
assistance.
--
Google
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--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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