Welcome to the Future, or, The Birth of Sharing
(pre-copyedit version)
In order to understand why sharing offers such a radical opportunity to create a better world, it's helpful to understand the origins of the World Wide Web. That history shows, pointedly, how the Web's origin is a story not just about technological whizbang; it's more fundamentally about great human drive… the primal need to interact with people who have similar experiences, values and goals.
While the Internet has actually been around for 40 years, it was largely the provenance of military researchers and academics until some Very Important Things happened. In early 1992, there were "26 reasonably reliable" servers connected to one another, forming the World Wide Web. By late 1993, that number had grown to more than 200, and a trifecta of events occurred within a few months of each other to send the WWW hurtling toward the mainstream:
- A lot of users had been using something called Gopher developed by the University of Minnesota to share documents with one another. The university made a very silly judgment call: They decided to charge organizations who wanted to use this technology on their servers. That decision caused server administrators to explore other free options; the World Wide Web, just gaining traction, was quite attractive.
- Then CERN, the organization that was "in charge" of the technology behind the WWW, decided that it wouldn't charge for licensing the tech, and that it would make the code readily available to anyone who was interested.
- Finally, Marc Andreessen, who had left NCSA in '93 to start a company focused on Web software, publicly released the first version of Mosaic, after earlier versions had gained popularity among academics. It was one of the first graphical Web browsers accessible for everyday folks to use, and one of the first to display images "inline," or within the Web page. Inline images were a huge leap! Mosaic and the company Andreessen founded eventually became Netscape.
Viola, the rush to the WWW was born. But it was very different from what it looks like now. If we wanted to publish something online… think of the Web then almost like a library with an infinite amount of space and few books in it… here are the hurdles we might have encountered. First, we'd have to have get access to a server that was connected to the Web. Access was fairly limited, as most of the Web was being used for academic purposes, and online services such as Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe wanted customers to stay within the neat walled garden of content they provided. Even the Well, a nerd-famous online community started in 1985 in San Francisco, while having a more open policy for getting on board with the Web, still continued to maintain its own non-Web content for a number of years.
Once we had server access, we (or someone we knew) had to know Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), the language that's used to present documents on the Web. It was pretty simplified compared to actual programming languages, but it was created by geeks for geeks. Anyone could learn it, but it took a certain bent toward the nerdy to get into it.
Once we finished putting those documents in HTML, we'd have to transfer them to the Web server so that they could be "served," or viewed by others. Each one would have its own unique URL that we could then share with our friends. Sharing the documents could be tricky. Few people had email, and probably fewer had Internet access. The few who did have access and email (again, mostly people at universities or in certain workplaces) could go to the links and read the documents. To share feedback, they'd have to send private messages to the author of the document, or if they belonged to some sort of group messaging service, like a listserv, they could offer comments to the group. Everything operated within closed systems, which means that the conversation was contained within its own little sphere, with little to no extension into public conversations.
