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Well, it works, doesn't it?
I still seal some letters with that red stuff that one melts, and I press a my ring in it. It may be low tech, but it works, and no one ever sent me an Ad based on whats' in there.
Sometimes the seal is broken in modern mail, but never enough to open the envelope. Of course you're not supposed to do that, but it works.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Well, it works, doesn't it?
I'd say that it works for sending, but not for receiving. When I write (that would be 'wrote') a letter to a friend an they answer by returning (that would be 'returned') a phone call, and today you have no response at all but when you meet them, they might (if they still remember you) ask 'Why are you not on FaceBook? It is impossible to reach you! ... Well, then I am not sure that I would agree to 'It works'.
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trønderen wrote: Why are you not on FaceBook? It is impossible to reach you!
Not impossibru; just appropriately hard 
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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trønderen wrote: 'Why are you not on FaceBook? It is impossible to reach you!
How did these people ever reach anyone else before Facebook, would be my first question...
I don't miss anyone who thinks the only way to reach someone is by looking them up on Facebook.
About a decade ago I was told "we" had a 20-year high school reunion (a few years prior), and I had not been made aware of it because whoever organized it only bothered to look up and send invites to people on Facebook...
If anyone who knows anything about me searches for my name on the internet at large, they'll only find stuff from a few people who I know happen to share my name and surname, but clearly don't share any hobbies or interests (anyone who knows me would not mistaken me for someone else who posts anything anywhere using my name).
And frankly I'd rather have it that way.
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Could not have said it better! 
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: I still seal some letters with that red stuff that one melts
Now that's old school, I like it!
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Safety deposit boxes come to mind. MS is allowing only "their devices" to connect to XBox. Most see it as an issue. I think it's to exclude cheats as much as possible. It may all be about security and less nonsense (user handling). Time sharing.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: I think it's to exclude cheats as much as possible.
Hmmm...
I suspect that although that might be true the real driver is money.
Marketing looks better if you can say "it is safer for you" versus "we make more money this way"
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"On this day in 1990, CERN's Tim Berners-Lee laid the foundations for the modern World Wide Web, writing the first web page on a NeXT workstation. Who knew how far it would come? And how much further you might help it go?": O'Reilly
Who? Me?
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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theoldfool wrote: O'Reilly
Oh really?
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No, O'Reilly
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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Well done, only a day late.
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The beginning of his work that gave us the first HTML page begins with Vannevar Bush's "memex", from a 1945 article he wrote.
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I was teaching computer networking at a tech. college when WWW appeared. Gopher had been in the curriculum for a few years (and the students actually found a lot of useful information on various Gopher sites). We went into all sorts of protocol details - layout of protocol units, exchange procedures etc.
So I presented WWW as an augmented Gopher protocol, and not even very much augmented. The big thing was a new type of content (Gopher already had a few), which required a more fancy presentation. Gopher had facilities for linking from one page to another, but with the 'old' content types, a page would either have a list of annotated links, or informative text. An HTML page could intermix links and information; we did not view it as any earth shaking generalization (which it turned out to be!).
Gopher also allowed user data to be supplied with the request. HTTP POST defined a standard format for this information, which was good thing, making it a lot more useful. Yet we saw it as not that much more than a far more complete specification of the Gopher selector. At the technical level, the differences between Gopher and HTTP 1.0 are surprisingly small - so small that HTTP could, at the functional level, be seen as a Gopher update (although a major one).
If Gopher has been extended with a new 'HTML' page type, alongside with plain text pages, lists of links pages, file transfer, information search functions, ... and the selector format standardized to something like what POST uses, the Gopher protocol could have provided something very WWW-like.
In other words: We were not that greatly impressed by WWW when it arrived to replace Gopher.
We underestimated the effect of the (technically speaking) minor extensions, by orders of magnitude! But for a long time (and I would say that it partially holds even today), the WWW revolution was not on the technical side, but how it is used.
If you read between the lines - to help you a bit, I will drag it up on the the line: The success of HTTP/HTML has a lot to do with promotion. Marketing. CERN was a lot better than U of Minn in their marketing of HTTP/HTML. If they had made it as an extension of Gopher, rather than creating a new protocol, they could probably have succeeded, too. Presenting sa new name sometimes is essential in marketing. (Unless you have invested a lot in the old name - CERN had not. Look at e.g. ethernet or USB - they each cover several more or less completely different protocols, but the standard developers have succeeded in hiding the differences.)
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trønderen wrote: In other words: We were not that greatly impressed by WWW when it arrived to replace Gopher.
In my mind nothing is particularly 'great' because everything I have ever researched in detail was just basically a minor improvement over something that was already there.
Or not even an improvement. Just marketed better.
trønderen wrote: has a lot to do with promotion
Yep. Or confusion even.
That is why I learned about the Brontosaurus in school out of science books.
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Agreed.
FTP -> GOPHER -> HTTP
One great feature of FTP is that a control node (C) can initiate a transfer from server A to sever B. Very useful if C was on a slower WAN.
I am not sure if GOPHER supports that operation.
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Are you CERNten?
I'll get my coat, I know the way out.
As the aircraft designer said, "Simplicate and add lightness".
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.3.0 JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: SimpleWizardUpdate
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Find your way home? I am sure you know the address.
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The NeXT work station on the other hand.....
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theoldfool wrote: Who? Me?
Every day we live, we change the world. That's the words from a 7 year one.
And it is technically correct. You change the world.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I remember lots of utilites on CD's that came with books on ISAPI, etc. Writing HTTP server and client book samples.
Client-server with a different client.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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I well remember sitting in the bar with Tim and Vint, scribbling out protocol outlines on bar napkins, asking the waitress for more napkins and a fresh pen, and taking a swipe at grabbing her... erm, never mind that part. Heady days, they was, and we were full of dreams for saving mankind. Yeah, it was pretty good grass. Then there was Bill, telling the world that no one will ever need more than 64k of RAM. What a buzzkill he was, silly nerd. Good times, good times, indeed; they'll never be back because all of that is illegal now. Poor kids, you have no idea what you're missing... It was the best of times, and the worst of times.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: Yeah, it was pretty good grass. Then there was Bill, telling the world that no one will ever need more than 64k of RAM. What a buzzkill he was, silly nerd.
I doubt very much that you are referring to a statement you heard at that occasion. When Gates was asked about this quote, he did not remember the specific situation, but said that it probably was a statement he made in discussions about how to split the 1 mebi (1024 Ki) address space between OS and user: With that total, giving the OS, drivers etc. 384 Ki, applications 640 Ki - that sounds like a reasonable split. 640 Ki out of 1024 Ki total should be enough for everyone.
I guess that he was right. Giving user processes all of the 1024 Ki would not leave any space at all for an OS. Giving the OS significantly less might lead to a lot of of time consuming page faults in the OS, significantly slowing down the system.
This sounds like a very reasonable context for the most famous quote ever made by Bill Gates. But it is completely unrelated to the work by Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf. Once essential point is that all the early internet work (as well as most of the intermediate work) was done on non-MS platforms: Initially on IBM mainframes, then gradually moving over to DEC, mostly PDP, operating systems, and then to various UNix variants. Windows was a latecomer in the networking world. The Next workstation where Tim Berners-Lee ran the first WWW demos was running Unix. I never heard of Windows being ported to Next.
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trønderen wrote: But it is completely unrelated to the work by Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf
So? It's a reminiscence (*), which is very much in line with the original post. No need to be judgmental.
(*) Apocryphal and almost certainly fictional, too
Software Zen: delete this;
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