Yesterday, the 13 year old son of our Macintosh support person came into my office (as his father directed) and installed System 7.5.3 Update 2.0 on my machine. No wonder PC support personnel would be worried about job security if more Macs got in the door!--Barry Lockard
So that’s the history of the Internet. The web began only a little later. The web was conceived the day two merchants sealed a record of barter in a clay ball. The trick caught on quickly. It was eminently simple and reasonably secure. If two merchants trade four sheep for one cow, a figurine of a cow and four figurines of sheep get sealed into a clay ball. When the clay dries, the contract is sealed.
The only problem was that you had to break the contract in order to verify it. So some enterprising bankers started putting representations of the figurines on the outside of the balls. Now, bankers are a stuffy, conservative lot. I can guarantee you that it wasn’t a banker who first pointed out that with the etched pictures you don’t need the little clay figurines. Flatten out the clay, write on it, let it dry and you’ve got a tablet that can be stacked in the back room and ignored even more easily than a clay ball can be broken.
Clay tablets were pretty nice, but you still couldn’t take them to the beach, and if you made a mistake it’s there for history. A few thousand years later your mistakes get put in museums and laughed at by college students in prestigious journals.
The big breakthrough, and when the world wide web was born, came with the introduction of papyrus, ink, and the alphabet. Suddenly you could carry these things around without a herd of slaves for the tablets and a scholar to actually write. Suddenly rulers and politicians and businessmen could write their own damn ledgers, books, and manifestos. Suddenly the scholar was out of business and went to begging on the streets. (Today their intellectual heirs beg to the government. Scholars are a tenacious lot and have held on much longer than anyone thought possible.)
The problem with this new form of writing was that it was too damn easy! From the Egyptian pyramid builders to the plantation owners of the American south the history of paper has been a losing battle to keep the wrong people from using it. Subjects and slaves must not be allowed to read and to write. The slave who can read knows as much about current events as you do. And the slave who can write can create current events.
As the knowledge of writing spread throughout slave and slave-owner alike, the stage for revolution was set. I like to call this revolution the revenge of the reader. It began when the monastic orders discovered a market for “mass-produced” books. As more people learned to read, more people wanted to read. But when any author’s book is published as a limited edition of one, books get pretty expensive. The monasteries began copying books.
Unfortunately, they began copying books that they wanted to copy. So unless you wanted to read the Bible or Augustine’s “City of God” (and the latter was more than a bit dodgy in some monks’ minds), you were out of luck. It took Gutenberg’s printing press to wrest the reading revolution away from the Bible and put it in the hands of the Daily Press. In 1453, Gutenberg threw the entire world into a turmoil from which it has yet to recover. His printing press allowed anyone with access to print whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, in whatever quantity they wanted. The invention of the personal rifle has been credited with winning the American revolution, but it was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense that made sure there was a revolution to win. Gutenberg’s invention allowed anyone with a printing press to take over small countries from their garage.
The world wide web began its adolescence in 1840. When the first daily press hit the streets the reader was in full control. We already had the scissors and the pencil. We could take that newspaper, cut it up, and hang it on our wall. We awaited only the invention of the refrigerator to bring the world wide web into adulthood. Because that’s what the web is: full reader control over the presentation of someone else’s printed work.
The secret of writing for the web is to take advantage of that, not fight it every step of the way. Computer professionals call it “scalability”; traditional publishers just call it a nightmare. It means that it is possible to write your book so that anyone can read it, whether they’re using a cheap text-only computer terminal in Africa or high-end graphics workstation in silicon valley. But it also means that the person with the graphics workstation can choose to view your page as if they had nothing more than a text terminal, if they decide they don’t like the speed of your connection or the color of your graphics. And you have no control over it. You can fight it, or you can live with it.
The actual invention of the Internet as a carrier for the web brings the web into middle age, and the long decline towards the grave.
