Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?
The modern, more economic web, wouldn't come until Netscape added form fields and cookies, at the behest of some of the original owners. And there were a ton of people at Netscape making these decisions about their vision of the future of the web. In-browser music listening wouldn't come until Macromedia, Disney and Microsoft pushed their vision for a "multi-media web"; browsers wouldn't build native support until much, much later.
So yes, we absolutely decided what the web would be about, and built technology to match that vision.
I'm as much of a HyperCard fan as (almost) anyone else, but that is almost certainly not where the term "hyperlink" comes from. Ted Nelson used the word "link" back in the mid 1960s, in the context of another coinage of his, "hypertext". The historical record is already a little unclear about whether or not he was using hyperlink that early, but by the time HyperCard came to be, the term was already differentiated from a "simple link", with some level of implication caused by the "hyper" prefix that it was most likely on another computer/server. The most HyperCard could offer was a link into a different stack.
The "hyper" prefix predated Hypercard, and it's meaning in the context of information processing/retrieval/presentation meant more than the majority of links that HyperCard offered (even though they were also great). Yes, I know that the wikipedia page on the word "hyperlink" claims that HyperCard "may have been the first use", but the cited reference for that claim offers no evidence for it whatsoever.
EDIT: here's a good summary article of pre-WWW hypertext systems from the 80s https://fibery.io/blog/hypertext-tools-from-the-80s/
As I recall, one of the example CGI programs from NCSA presented a form to fill out a Papa John's order, which was then sent via the email-to-fax gateway. Which, now that I think of it, was indeed more "economic".
Cookies was definitely a Netscape thing, for profit making - a shopping cart for MCI.
The early web's competition was things like FTP, Gopher, and email-driven apps (e.g., Listservs, the Usenet Oracle). Plus paper-based stuff, like department phone books, mailing documents around, etc. It was hugely better than any of those for many common uses, so adoption was rapid.
Once you have a critical mass of users, then it can make sense to add other things in. But for that first audience, we can't be vague, selling some shining future that will happen eventually.
- A simple system, designed from scratch, sometimes works.
- Some complex systems actually work.
- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
- A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
Systemantics, John Gall, 1978
1. The web succeeded but many things whose backers made similar comparisons failed. Knowing that one technology had a big impact doesn’t say that a given unproven technology will be the next one to go big. It’s more likely that you’re looking at the next Groove Networks or something like that.
2. The web was immediately useful for many people and you could get started easily. IPFS has some interesting but far from unique properties and trying to be a network increases the amount of adoption and maturity needed for it to be worth using for most people. This is especially true for peer-to-peer sharing where the most useful participation requires up-front risk and costs which many people aren’t going to want to accept. Without that, it’s basically just harder to use web hosting which may or may not be cheaper.
Netscape was founded in 1994.
So, if you’re comfortable with either of those a starting point, 6 years is somewhere in the dot com boom.
IPFS on the other hand is a horrible "jack of all trades" that has mediocre performance even in the best of times, and it hasn't really gotten any better since it first launched 6 years ago.
And that's not even bringing up the cryptocurrency cohort souring the project with its stench.
I don't object to the existence of IPFS, rather I prefer more efficient and focused projects instead. Someone in the comment threads mentioned Solid, which sounds like a decent decentralized information protocol or system of sorts.
And for those that want censorship resistance... who can forget Freenet? That project has been around since 2000 and seems to do a pretty bang up job, even if the performance is not much better.
I can't see the future. I can, however, look at the world and think about what I see.
The Web was a hit because it was really obviously useful for real work from the moment of its creation. IPFS is BitTorrent with magnet: links, and the seeding problems that implies, and the rest is janky nonsense.
The web was fast (for documents on 56k) and extremely useful almost immediately. It was obvious to everyone watching that the technology was going to change everything.
14.4 baud iirc. You wouldn't call it fast.
I had a 14.4K Zoom modem, but I'm pretty sure the ISP I worked for around '95-'96 was buying lots of US Robotics 33.6 modems.
I agree that 56k came a bit later, and didn't necessarily work on any particular phone line.
Something made it feasible right then for anybody to set up a bank of modems in their apartment, to provide direct internet, and there was an explosive growth in small ISPs before they consolidated. At the time, I was kind of oblivious to the historic moment, but the one I worked for was literally a few modems in the closet of a crummy apartment downtown when I started and within months we'd moved to an office a few blocks away and were installing modems like mad.
I found this, not necessarily authoritative:
"In 1994 the National Science Foundation commissioned four private companies to build four public Internet access points to replace the government-run Internet backbone: WorldCom in Washington, Pacific Bell in San Francisco, Sprint in New Jersey, and Ameritech in Chicago. Then other telecom giants entered the market with their own Internet services, which they often subcontracted to smaller companies. By 1995 there were more than 100 commercial ISPs in the USA."
I think that was probably it - right then and there anyone could buy a pipe to the internet and connect some modems. It was around then that I heard the term "T1" which was a lot back then.
Maybe there was some connection to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act...
I don't know, but probably significantly better than a few years later, due to how vast an improvement 95 was.
There really, in my view, and in some of the magazine reviews I read back then, was nothing to recommend Windows 3.1(1) except if (a) you couldn't afford a Mac, or (b) you wanted to run software that wasn't available for one.
Suddenly, once 95 got traction, people promoting Macintoshes had to make excuses for the lack of memory protection or pre-emptive multitasking, on top of the high prices. And Windows just wasn't as godawful ugly any more.
But at the moment that ISPs were all sparking into existence, I don't think the wave had quite arrived. I mean, people were getting it and I do remember vaguely the initial version of IE, but 95 wasn't even the majority of PC users for a little while.
A browser for 3.1 that I kind of remember from those days, that lapsed into obscurity, was Cello:
Before that, the way to get software (for me, because I wasn't a college student) was to go to a local computer store and copy their disks containing free or shareware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish
But everything changed about 1995.
"Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web server? Is it about replacing DNS? Is it about censorship resistance?"
websites at the beginning did not decide to be a caching layer - they decided to be websites. they did decide to permanently store content. they did decide to use web servers. they did not decide to replace dns. they did decide to be about censorship resistance.
now imagine you put up a website, put some time into it, and it may or may not be up at a random time in the future. not a product that's usable.