Re: comp.sys.apple2 yahoo group

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <dh90el$bcs$1@theodyn.ncf.ca>,
Michael Black <et472@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:

> "julian814" (julian814@hotmail.com) writes:
>> Paul Schlyter wrote:
>>> In article <1127685576.330370.289480@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
>>> A2Pro <a2@wilserv.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> > Hi, y'all!
>>> >
>>> >     Do ALL of the above at:
>>> > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AppleII/
>>> > It's an older, well established group with many more members.
>>>
>>> No, it's not older....
>>>
>>> Your Yahoo! group "AppleII" started in 1998.
>>>
>>> comp.sys.apple2 started 8 years earlier, in 1990.  Back then
>>> Yahoo! wasn't even around....
>> 
>> I thought Yahoo was around back then, but only as a search engine?
> 
> The Web either didn't exist in 1990, or was barely starting out.  I can't
> remember whether it was 90 or 91.

CERN developed and used WWW internally in 1990 and 1991 and released
it publicly in 1992.

The Web took off in 1993-1994.
 
In June 1993 NCSA started to develop Mosaic, the world's first
graphica web browser.  It was released in September 1993.

Netscape 1.0 was released in 1994 and Internet Explorer in 1995.

The first version of Opera was released in 1994.

Lynx (a text mode web browser) was released in 1993 and quickly
became the preferred browser for character based terminals.  It
is still used today.


> Hence there'd be nothing for Yahoo to search.
>
> Things like Gopher and Archie were in their prime.
> 
> It was only after the Web took off that a need for a search engine for
> it came along.  I think in Yahoo's case it was 1995.
> 
>   Michael


Before WWW it would have been quite possible to write "spider"
software which visited ftp sites and Usenet newsgroups, then building
indexes which could be distributed by ftp or Usenet News.

But in 1992 the Internet was quite small compared to today.  The
number of hosts all over the Net was only about a million.  You could
get Internet access through some organisation which had Internet
access (usually universities but also a few companies) - private
subscriptions to Internet access was still in the future.

Keeping an eye on what happened on the WWW during the early years
was best done by following those Usenet newsgroups you found
interesting.


I got Internet access myself in 1991 but no web access until 1994.
Before 1994 I had only email and Usenet News access, plus (via mail
robots) ftp access.  In 1993 a lot of Usenet posts started to refer
to http://www ..... sites, talking about something called "World Wide
Web" I had never heard about before.  I tried to visit a number of
web sites through ftp instead - surprisinly often it worked!
Apparently a lot of sites had set up their ftp and web servers to the
same root directory.  I visited those web sites I could with ftp
and saved the web addresses of the others who sounded interesting
for later use.  When I finally got web access in 1994, I had a lot
of sites to visit!




-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Grev Turegatan 40,  SE-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at stockholm dot bostream dot se
WWW:     http://stjarnhimlen.se/