Some say it all started by the invention of the electric telegraph in 1848...
Before coming to the subject, here are some interesting lines, as I can't resist
(from several sources, so differently 'styled', and I also want to bring you in an historical mood):
- Thus, by the end of 1969, four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet was off the ground.
- In October 1972 Kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC). This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It was also in 1972 that the initial "hot" application, electronic mail, was introduced. In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages.
- A key concept of the Internet is that it was not designed for just one application, but as a general infrastructure on which new applications could be conceived, as illustrated later by the emergence of the World Wide Web. It is the general purpose nature of the service provided by TCP and IP that makes this possible.
- Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications.
- In 1988, a National Research Council committee, chaired by Kleinrock and with Kahn and Clark as members, produced a report commissioned by NSF titled "Towards a National Research Network". This report was influential on then Senator Al Gore, and ushered in high speed networks that laid the networking foundation for the future information superhighway.
Al Gore? yes, Al Gore
That involvement in the coming of the WWW alone should have made him President
- 1989 March
Tim Berners-Lee starts work on a hypertext GUI browser+editor using the NeXTStep development environment. He makes up "WorldWideWeb" as a name for the program.
- Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces).
-- Have a look at this fascinating early example screen of the first open internet browser ever (sorry, shouldn't have made the image smaller, but the letters CERN are clearly visible).
No promt commands, wíndows, pull down menues and buttons instead - wasn't Steve jobs involved with NeXt at that time? :
- 1994 January
O'Reilly, Spry, etc announce "Internet in a box" product to bring the Web into homes.
March
Marc Andreessen and colleagues leave NCSA to form "Mosaic Communications Corp" (later Netscape).
May 25-27
First International WWW Conference, CERN, Geneva. Heavily oversubscribed (800 apply, 400 allowed in): the "Woodstock of the Web".
(bolds by me).
1995 February
The Web is the main reason for the theme of the G7 meeting hosted by the European Commission in the European Parliament buildings in Brussels (BE).
March
CERN holds a two-day seminar for the European Media (press, radio, TV), attended by 250 reporters, to show WWW. It is demonstrated on 60 machines, with 30 pupils from the local International High School helping the reporters "surf the Web".
1998 December
John Cooper starts Planetz.com, a nice website with member functionality.
However the site seemed to suffer from some interests confusion because of an almost poetic mix of commercial, public, and personal entries.
Time was his adventage, and March 2001 he adopted phpBB, available since 2000, to give the user base it's own place,
Yet, back in 1998, the start was there, and noone could stop that anymore.
The Z factor - as firstly described by the theory of the Hypnagogic Creativity as founded around 1997 when he was able to stay in that Z mode for ours - was the base for everything, and up to today Planet-Z is the name that says it all.
kidding
And here we are
He he, the 'Woodstock of the internet', so I missed the second one also
It's hard to believe that it's hardly 13 years ago that the revolution really started to grow worldwide already (available for everybody, based on home computers).
You must be old(er) to realize it really, for those who are born with cellphones and internet it would be just a matter of 'it's simply there'
Anyway, to come back to the real subject, I started to think about the Planetz forums as we now know it (disregarding from the last year's phpBB update).
I googled for the start of phpBB, as that's the underlying program that visualizes everything.
It was in 2000.
I started at the very Creamware 'forum' in the spring of 2001, and man how spartanic it was
I entered Planetz in september 2001, so for me, at the time, it looked like 'it's just there'.
I knew Planetz had a pre-history phase, but that obviously was before 'my time'.
So I sent john a few lines about the subject, asking him about those early days.
And guess...you still can (partly) see how early Planetz looked like!
John gave me this link:
http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html
After entering, type www-period-planetz.com
Didn't know something like that exists, it's great!
It's like time traveling
Check out how Planetz looked like in the beginning of februari 2001, just before the transition to the phpBB Planetz:
http://web.archive.org/web/200102110405 ... 06901.html
I was able to track a few names of who are still here, most famous now probably is Alfonso
And here's the first screenshot I could find of the new style:
http://web.archive.org/web/200105051704 ... com/phpBB/
Watch the end of both urls...
also check, in the second link, the text at the 'Testing' forum, it's illustrative: 'Testing, please ignore'
Thanks John, you was pretty fast jumping on the train, and it's amazing how good and timeless it lookes like from the very start!
A perfect shot!
So...no, also this time it wasn't just there, someone, John, invested time and knowledge in it, and the funny thing is, that web-archive shows it: you can check all planetz files (pages) from the very first start.
I'd say, John wrote history, as meant by Tim Berner-Lee himself
Should I say thank you again, John?
Yes, thank you
And now I'm gonne check the old, ridiculous, unreadable, chaotic, text based, ugly-white and flamed (dxl) Creamware forum pages...
but now you're on your own guys
End of history mode
edit 1: tell me, is the font size of the quotes to small to read?
I choose for a smaller font-size as they are just 'colorization'.
edit 2. ok, I changed it to normal, as the difference between normal and size 9 is to big, I myself have troubles to read, due to close/far incongruencies
