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Comment by ff317 | Hacker News Reader

Not to knock the amazing contributions of Tim, but IMHO Gopher and HyperCard had already laid a lot of the important concepts down in various suboptimal ways. I think there were enough smart people using both in the 90s that it was virtually inevitable that something like Tim's work was bound to arise somewhere, somehow, as a merger of and improvement on those two sets of ideas.

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Don't forget about Minitel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

> The service was rolled out experimentally on 15 July 1980 in Saint-Malo, France (...)

> From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to what is now made possible by the World Wide Web.

It was similar from the user point of view, but it was absolutely different from creator/admin point of view. It was supposed to be a service provided by big cable/telecom companies and not something that everyone would've been able to use to create. The whole architecture gives it away - minitel is merely a display device to a telecom mainframe, paid per minute of connection. The average Joe was not supposed to create their own services/pages.

Perhaps their plan was to, once successful, create a Minitel AppStore and allow smaller developers ...

Given how big telecoms usually behave, I really don't think so. Remember the fight for usable mobile internet... Ever tried WAP and developing on it?

They set the whole thing up to control it and charge extraorbitant fees for it both to the user and to anyone publishing on it. Minitel as well as WAP. Apple's 30% is peanuts compared to the fees I'm talking about - I mean contracts with minimums in millions.

Good thing Apple kicked their sand castle down. People don't give them enough credit for that.

People do seem to forget about things like Verizon forcing camera phone vendors to disable Bluetooth on their devices to prevent you from being able to transfer image files off the phone without going through Verizon and paying a per image fee.

Don’t forget about the Mother of All Demos [1] with Douglas Engelbart! Windows, hypertext, graphics, navigation and command input, video conferencing, the mouse, word processing, dynamic links, revision control, and real time collaboration; all that in 1968!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Rand Corp had a moonbase idea on paper two years before.

So why didn't Engelbart invent HTML and HTTP in the 60s? At it's core it's a very simple protocol and minimal document format comparable in complexity to systems that existed at the time. Computers back then were perfectly capable of implementing it.

Some here have compared the WWW to the iPhone, but the iPhone literally couldn't have existed even a few years previously. With the Web there were no meaningful barriers to it's development 20 years previously. If a more complex and clunky system had gained critical mass in it's place, that's what we might have got stuck with for a very long time.

It took Englebert over a decade to build the mouse and when he was done and gave a demo Xerox hired his lab.

The barrier to the web was a global network and an IP address for each node. When the network was sufficient size and people had access to ip addresses the web happened. Before that we all just used the internet.

I'm not trash talking Englebart, in any way, I'm just saying the minimalist web approach was not at all obvious. To many, many pioneers there were a lot of sophisticated features they though would be absolutely essential to any pervasive hypertext system, that turned out not to be.

I wasn't sure. I thought it might be eye opening tidbit considering how many more years went into the development to make it commercial product. I can't remember if it was 14 or 17 years of development of Engelbart.

Another big hero of mine from that era that helped invent the internet and regret the result was Wesley A. Clark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_A._Clark

This. When the web first came about, it seemed evolutionary to me, not revolutionary, because it built on those ideas.

And Xanadu. That had built in editing and bidirectional hyperlink. Never really took off. In many cases the free open source product beat the commercial product.

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