I was curious about Yen and saw a small bio about him:
https://chinacenter.umn.edu/umn-china/history/alumni/disting...
Its a bit interesting, and shocking, some of the members of the teams behind proto-HTTP software in the 90s were college graduates in the early 60s. If I'm doing my math correctly Yen would be in his 80's today.
The best corners of the internet are not groups of people: they are collections of content. The content cannot pay you a license fee. The content cannot demand itself be constrained to non-profit ends.
i mean in some places you could get a dialup slip connection from something like netcom, but you would put the files you wanted to share on netcom's ftp server, not your own
My overall point doesn't just apply to this instance, though. It's something I see all over the place, even today; particularly in conversations about moderation and censorship.
Content has been siloed off so intensely that it's hard to even imagine a modern internet without arbitrary borders. Most of those borders are made across organizational lines. They are often made out of copyright, with the notion that some deserving party will be monetarily compensated.
Those borders usually don't align to the content itself. Instead, they become arbitrary hurdles, or even walls; making it unfeasible or impossible to truly benefit from content. Nearly every incompatibility in software was created intentionally, to cement and enforce these borders.
Now inference models (overconfidently called AI) like LLMs are all the rage. What do they do? They draw new borders. What are those borders meant to align with? The patterns that are already present in the content itself.
["Weaving the Web" (1999)]
On the other hand, I kind of miss Mosaic's ability to easily turn off image loading. There's more than a few sites that'd be improved by using that feature.
> Remember when UNIX was given away free?
> How many of you are using UNIX now? It is licensed.
You are not using UNIX unless you paid for a mac or iPhone (or higher cost machines like IBM AIX et.)
Linux is not a UNIX - it is not certified. Noone has paid for it to be certified.
It is an open protocol with open source implementations now. Just a bit too late.
[1] http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/_Books/_Digital_Press/daCruz_Ke...
If you like this kind of text, you might enjoy "C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications" by Joe Campbell.
The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...