If the Web Never Existed—A Short Film Starring the Titans of the World Wide Web


(Video Link)

What would life be like if Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues hadn’t invented the World Wide Web in 1991? The short film “World Wide What?” narrated by Stephen Fry describes that scenario. The awesome thing about this video is that it’s packed with the founders of major web and internet applications, including Tim Berners-Lee, Michael Bloomberg, Arianna Huffington, and Jimmy Wales.

If this dystopian nightmare were real life, it would have an impact at Neatorama. We’d have to go back to delivering cat .gifs by telegram, as Alex Santoso’s great-great-grandfather did when he founded the company back in 1887. And the artificial intelligence program that we affectionately refer to as “Miss Cellania” would never even exist.

-via Marilyn Terrell


If the WWW was not invented, you could still distribute your cat gifs by Usenet and FTP which predate the WWW by ~10 years and ~20 years respectively. Even one of the guys they mention there, Steve Case, was selling online services years before the WWW was conceived of by Berners-Lee. There is a lot more to the internet than the world wide web...
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OK, yeah. We'd use Usenet and Gopher. When you got an email attachment, you'd have to concatenate a bunch of .uue files and use UUdecode on them. That would be a bit inconvenient when you try to binge-watch "Friends" by going to ftp.netflix.com to download each episode. Oh, and when you want to get some software, you can send an email to the Simtel listserver, or send a query to Archie!

God, I am So Old!
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