From: Chris Pinard To: John Chodacki Cc: Bcc: Subject: Where I'm coming from. Reply-To: OK, so you, and/or possibly Gary and/or Tim, were wondering where I was coming from, with my head of steam, saying what I was this evening. Well, here it is. See, I may only be (nearly) 23 years old, a young punk who dropped out of college before getting his degree. One of the youngest people in the company. But, particularly when it comes to things on the Web, I am *old* *school*. I got online in 1994. Y'know what was happening on the Web in 1994? Nothing. Least, nothing anywhere close to the monstrosity that exists today. When I got online, Web servers were not standard things. They weren't even running on port 80, as they are today. Port 80, being below 1024, is what Unix systems consider a system-privileged port. Most Internet servers were Unix machines, and most of them still are. Server programs can only run on privileged ports if they're run by root (the super-user). This is not something you do if the server program, and indeed, the very networking concept it's predicated on, is still being evaluated to see if it's worth making regular use of. In 1994-1995, most places were just barely finishing their evaluations and beginning to put together basic, rudimentary Web sites. Back then, if you wanted to find something out there, you had archie or gopher. Back then, Yahoo was a small batch of hand-assembled HTML pages run off of some random machine at Stanford University. Back then, it was big news when the National Science Foundation finally decided to let go of the reins and stopped running the Internet. Back then, "Web programming" meant that you were either involved in the development of CERN's experimental HTTP server, or you were writing HTML under the mistaken pretense that HTML is a programming language (it's not; there is no iteration, no branching, no concept of a variable or true-false flow control or anything else like that). Back then, there was no Netscape/Internet Explorer shoot-out, no Java or JavaScript. Your choices were basically either a couple of flaky text-mode browsers, or a variety of flakier graphical browsers, mostly variations on Mosaic, if you really wanted to splurge and insist on seeing those graphics. Back then, hardware and bandwidth and everything else was awful bloody expensive. You didn't have $20/month unlimited PPP access from ten different commercial providers in your local calling area. You maybe had a dialup Unix shell account, text commands only, and you were getting charged for every hour, every minute, you were spending on that connection. Anyone getting SLIP/PPP access to the 'Net was paying through the nose for the privilege, especially given the slowness of the connections. This was the way the 'Net was when I got online, back in those days, which, I should note, were not really all that long ago. That was how it was when I first heard of this weird "World Wide Web" thing that had a chance of succeeding Gopher in the realm of interactive information searching and retrieval. When I heard about these possibilities, I didn't do what's probably standard procedure these days, didn't purchase some cute-titled book that purported to make it easy to do, didn't read some vapid trade magazine about how it was going to Change My Life or Make Me Rich or the like. I did what any good geek of the time did and researched. I found and read a couple of interviews that this or that computer magazine (which in those days meant that it was about hardware and software and programming and doing neat things with them) had with Tim Berners-Lee, he who invented HTML, HTTP, and the very idea of the Web as a result of earlier concepts of hypertext and information management. I read the specifications that were being developed. Yes, they were somewhat dense and dry and not really the most exciting reading in the world, but they gave an idea of not only the terminology of the language, but also the thinking, the methodology, behind it. The Why of the Web as well as the What and the How. I learned the motivations as well as the simple details of how it worked. It was noted that I had a certain vehemence, passion, emphasis to what I was saying this evening. And yes, I suppose I do. Why? Because I Know How The Web Works, in a way that no one else in this company has ever given any indication whatsoever of understanding it. You marginalized what I had to say this evening, played it down with the standard arguments about "how the browsers do things", how "there are so many other rules broken", and a variety of other complete irrelevancies to the point of proper consideration of creating Web pages. I am not some wet-behind-the-ears know-nothing kid. I am not some doddering eccentric whose foolish notions are to be humored rather than seriously considered. I am not some crazy lunatic spouting meaningless drivel. I am the man who keeps the technology in this company working, and the only one here, to any existing evidence, who can definitively say he properly understands the nature of the Web. Not what's been hyped and called the Web. I mean the World Wide Web that Berners-Lee thought of over a decade ago and had just started to hit mainstream usage when I got onto the 'Net. The Web that has been hyped is not the true Web. I Know What I'm Doing, and at least part of what I'm doing is trying my hardest to make sure we do things Right, so we don't create unmaintainable technical Frankenstein's-monsters for the sake of the current convenience that will turn around and cause more trouble than its worth to keep working, but which will have to be kept working because its what we chose to go with. I want things done right the first time this go-round. That's where I'm coming from. How about you? Chris Getting awful bloody sick of being marginalized and ignored, despite it happening so often that he should be used to it by now. -- Chris Pinard: Just zis guy, ya know? -- slarti@forefield.com Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?