Google and the Net

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, October 9, 2001, at 10:40 AM, Trei, Peter wrote:

>> Steve Mynott[SMTP:steve at tightrope.demon.co.uk] wrote:
>> Every thought how bad the net would be if google went away?
>>
> Actually, us old timers remember what it was like before google,
> or even altavista (the first real search engine). Heck, some of us
> remember what it was like before Usenet...
>
> In the early days of the web, you would start from some site which
> was vaguely associated with your topic, and follow links using a
> hill-climbing search pattern. It was slow, and kind of hit-or-miss.
> However, unlike today, many site maintainers really tried to maintain
> up-to-date, useful, and annotated lists of links to related sites. Yahoo
> started as just such a site, aglommerating link lists for many topics.
> (The web was a lot smaller in those days).
>
> Google is much goodness...

Hypertext in general is doubleplus good.

I remember Gopher, Archie, and all of those crufty tools. I never much 
used them.  A friend did, and he would show me stacks of printouts from 
obscure sites he'd found and ftp'ed.

I had a _very_ primitive access to the ARPANet in 1972-3, using a weird 
storage tube display in the Chemistry building at UCSB.

(One of the first four nodes, courtesy of folks like Glenn Culler, who 
did a lot of engineering work on the node processors. He had a company 
called "Culler-Fried" and also "Culler-Harrison." Early floating-point 
processors. One of his companies evolved into Floating Point Systems, in 
Beaverton, OR, and then this was eventually merged into Cray Research, 
and thence into Sun or SGI (I forget who got which pieces). I know that 
Sun's very successful multi-CPU offerings are largely based on the SPARC 
arrays done at FPS. So, from Culler to AP-120B to Cray to Sun in a mere 
30 years!)

Upon entering Intel, we had a lot of internal computer resources, but 
little or no access to ARPANet and then Internet. This changed around 
1980 for some groups, with strict controls, and changed again in the 
mid-80s. But even now there are obvious firewalls, formal and informal.

My first real Usenet account was gotten in 1988, through Portal 
Communications. One of the first to offer accounts to "civilians." (Part 
of the reworking/renaming/refocussing of the Net, but even then there 
was yammering that mentioning a product name violated the "no commercial 
use" rules.)

A major inflection point came in 1994-95, with the wide availability of 
browsers. Then Alta Vista and DejaNews. Now Google reigns supreme.

It'll be interesting to see how long Google survives.

--Tim May, Occupied America
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety 
deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.