I've been willing to share links to other places a bit more on here for a while, reflecting that hyperlinks are the essence of web and that the more of those, the better.

Part of doing that involves adding more sources to my RSS aggregator, which I'm slowly doing,¹ but I figure posting one off links to stuff I happen to find interesting is fine too.

I'm not sure whether I should add a dedicated page for this or simply treat those as regular posts. In the interest of doing what's easiest, I'll go for the second option for now and introduce a new category.

And so, I stumbled upon this site chronicling the early days of the web the other day while researching some facts about the era of the AOL portal, and thought it'd make for a fine first place to share:

The History of the Web

It's both a book in the writing and a blog, and it's pretty neat.

I've been reading through the archives over the last few days and I've learned a lot. My favourite tidbit so far is how Megadeth was apparently the first high profile band to have a promotional website back in 1994.

I got online around 1999, maybe 2000, and I was too young back then to care about what was actually happening. To a true early adopter, I was part of the latecomers who started to ruin it all. But the sense of wonder described in many of Hoffmann's post was still there, and even though I didn't give it much thought or realize what it meant, I remember it.

So I'm feeling some weird nostalgia as I read, as even though I didn't know most of the sites he describes, I did get to tinker with their direct successors.

It's interesting to see how fast business came in the picture, too. I knew about the dot com bubble, but somehow I had the impression that the commercialization of the web happened a tad later. Maybe I simply get that period confused with the one before it, when the internet was still ruled by Usenet.

It also reminds me that the history of technology is both fascinating and important. And the web and its early promises are part of that history, right on the heels on the UNIX wars.

I'm convinced that knowing at least a little bit of that story is one of the keys if we ever want to take back some kind of control over it, if only to learn to recognize the bullshit behind the hype cycles of today.

So hats off to Jay Hoffmann, doing his part to spread the tale. See ya and good reading.