Re: OT Re: DEFINING CULTURAL YEAR of THE DECADE?

[Mech <mech@m3ch.net>]

At 3:52 PM +0100 1/2/09, Per Boysen wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 3:44 PM,  <kkissinger@kevinkissinger.com> wrote:
>>  As far as a defining cultural year in the 90s?  I can't really think 
>of a
>  > specific year.  The emergence of the World Wide Web and changed 
>everything.
>
>Yes, I remember the excitement when Mosaic was released! The first web
>browser that could show text and graphics together. Came out of
>Switzerland just as the EDP!

Whoops! Close, but no cigar.  It was actually the HTTP protocol and 
HTML document language that was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN 
in Switzerland, IIRC.  There was an initial web browser (called, 
creatively enough, WWW) but I can remember using it and thinking 
"what the heck is the difference between this and Gopher"? 
Inspiring, it was not.

Mosaic, however, was developed by the Software Development Group of 
the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) at the 
University of Illinois (I started grad school at the U of I only a 
couple months after Mosaic was released).  It can definitely lay 
claim to making apparent the power behind the Web.

Coincidentally, the lead developer on Mosaic was a fellow by the name 
of Mark Andreson, who you might remember went on (only about four 
months later) to form a little company named Netscape.

        --m.
-- 
_____
"the wind in my heart; the dust in my head...."