Jean-Baptiste Quéru's (accurate and complete to my study) description of
the details (down to the physical layer) of what happens when you go to
Google's homepage reminds me of how, roughly 22 years ago, at LANL:
<long-winded technical anecdote>
We wrote a simple PERL script to act as a daemon (a program running all
the time, listening on a logical port (conventionally 80) on the
network) to field this new thing called the Hyper Text Transfer
Protocol. It would then parse the request (e.g. "HTTP GET
SomeGoodStuff"), whereupon the daemon did a directory search of the
Gopher directory structure for a directory (or file) at the root named
"SomeGoodStuff"... assuming it was a *directory* rather than a *file* it
then returned the directory listing enclosed in a <UL> tag and each
directory or file name enclosed in <LI>SubdirectoryOrFileName</LI> tag,
sending that back over the network to whomever so requested it. If it
were a *file*, it would return the contents of the file. I think this
was before MIME types, so the requesting client was left to decide what
to do with the contents based on some assumptions about the file
extension (.txt, .html, .jpg, etc.) and/or the "Magic Number
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_%28programming%29#Magic_numbers_in_files>"
(a simple "signature" in the first several bytes of the file).
When we redirected the Directory Name Services (DNS) server for
www.lanl.gov and put it up for public access, we alerted Tim Berner's
Lee at CERN and we became the 50th listing on his homepage
<http://info.cern.ch/> of "other World Wide Web servers. It wasn't long
after that that the Web exploded, growing (geometrically?) to rapidly to
follow, both in number and complexity of servers and in content type.
Our own Chad Kieffer here on this list, entered the picture as a freshly
minted Graphic Designer interning at LANL. I helped to teach him to
hand cut HTML along with a half-dozen other designers there, and within
a year, they outstripped my knowledge of all things Web, along with
hundreds of individuals around LANL learning/creating on their own.
When we retired that PERL Script in favor of an early Apache (a Patchy)
server with dedicated (including the Gopher branch) content, I was
already losing track of the details that Queru (this has to be a taken
name or a psuedonymn doesn't it?) outlines here, and I was right smack
in the center of that vortex. As I remember it, Chad took lead on
handling the LANL Science Museum's presence and half a dozen others took
on equally important branches in our growing bush of nonsense.
In parallel, Alan Ginsparg
<http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/%7Eginsparg/blurb/pg14Oct94.html> was
building xxx.lanl.gov which was NOT a pornography web server, though
LANL and DOE administrators were *sure* it either *was* or would be
mistaken *for* such. It was an archive for scientific papers which
would eventually become what everyone today knows and loves as ARXIV.org
<http://archive.org>. Alan's xxx.lanl.gov may have been up fielding
requests before www.lanl.gov even, it was hard to reconstruct the
history later down the line. Those of us who saw the barest hint of
the future knew Alan was on to something and that LANL bureaucrats would
do all they could to FF it up. Several of us went to bat with the
administrators to keep them off Paul's back, but he didn't need any help
or protection, he was a force of nature.
It has been a very short but very long 22 years! I could dig up a
screenshot of one of our early pages (even find a few of them on
Brewster Kahle's Wayback Machine, but they are quite ugly/clunky and I
would just embarass myself). If you do go to the Wayback Machine
<http://archive.org/web/web.php>, you will note that LANL was being
crawled a LOT during the 2005-2006 tenure of Retired Admiral Dr. Peter
G. Nanos when Doug was using his Pester Power on HIM. Sergey and Larry,
be VERY afraid!
Others here may be interested in using the Wayback Machine to traipse
down their own "memory lane". Most of us are used to the web being
ephemeral... imagining that if we see one thing one day that it will be
there forever, yet realizing at the same time that in fact, web pages
change all of the time with no record kept by the web server of the
earlier versions. The Wayback Machine and Internet Archive has done as
much as it could to grab snapshots of the web (and other internet
resources) as often as it can to help ameliorate that. Only history
will tell how well they are doing!
</long-winded technical anecdote>
- Steve
Sorry for the double post, but I thought a bit more info from below
the fold of essay would help:
For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great
success of technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely
hidden and people can use them without even knowing that they
exist at all. <snip>
That is also why it's so hard for technologists and
non-technologists to communicate together: technologists know too
much about too many layers and non-technologists know too little
about too few layers to be able to establish effective direct
communication. <snip>
That is why the mainstream press and the general population has
talked so much about Steve Jobs' death and comparatively so little
about Dennis Ritchie's: Steve's influence was at a layer that most
people could see, while Dennis' was much deeper. <snip>
Finally, last but not least, that is why our patent system is
broken: technology has done such an amazing job at hiding its
complexity that the people regulating and running the patent
system are barely even aware of the complexity of what they're
regulating and running. <snip>
On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
From HN, a pointer to a delightfully clever essay that would be
loved by Nick and others who are often bewildered by the hacker
alphabet soup of acronyms and buzz words.
Well, what _does_ happen when you got to a web page?
https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408597
This has the possibility of a new book that somehow makes it all
reasonably clear. Maybe.
-- Owen
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