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Our weekly video hangout series!
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I think - let's see, we started a little bit off time
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so I'll say it again:
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Welcome to GV Face, our weekly video hangout series!
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Today, we are celebrating the 25th birthday of the world wide web.
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Pretty exciting. That was on Wednesday.
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Um, we've got a really all-star lineup of guests
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on today's program.
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Um, moving from left to right, we have:
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Alan Emtage, a very special guest who is
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gonna talk to us about his very special creation
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of, uh, the first web browser...
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Um! We have Jeremy Clark, in Montreal -
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Jeremy is a technical director at Global Voices.
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Josh Levy, from Free Press,
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in Massachusetts, in the U.S.
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and Renata Avila, campaign manager
for the Web We Want
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Creative Commons extraordinaire, and
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GV star.
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who is joining us from Berlin!
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Welcome, everybody!
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Um. So we wanted to start today's show
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by talking a little bit about the world wide web
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and the internet.
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'Cuz a lot of people think that they're the same thing
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when actually, that's not quite true.
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I want to first turn to Jeremy
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and just ask, Jer, could you
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break it down for us, like,
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I thought that the internet was invented in the 70's
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but, if it's the 25th birthday of the web,
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what does that mean?
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Jeremy Clark: Okay, well, the
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best place to start, I think, is
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the internet - it has existed in various formats
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since the 1970's, as you said,
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but it was the web that really made it
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enter our homes.
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and, so, understanding the relationship is important.
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So, the internet was invented by
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the U.S. Government in a lot of senses...
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...a mix of military and science funding
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that developed the network of
actual computers
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that can communicate with each other over
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wires.
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Now, another related technology that is also compri--
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[amends] uh, built in to the web
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is called hypertext. And that is the notion
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of documents that can link between each other
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immediately, without having to go and fetch
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a separate document. Um.
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So there were lots of systems since the 1960s
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that were trying to implement hypertext, like,
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Xanadu is an example,
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uh, but all of them were commercial,
expensive, closed,
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and none of them were very popular.
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So, Tim Berners-Lee, who is the
"inventor of the internet,"
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[corrects himself] of the web,
obviously, the World Wide Web -
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Um. [Tim Berners-Lee] put those two things together
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by building a service that runs
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on top of the internet, and he
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called it the World Wide Web.
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So what the World Wide Web is, is the
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decentralized hypertext engine
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that we use to communicate between
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computers' web pages.
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So what makes up WEB is three things:
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URLs (or URIs) - Universal Resource Locator
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which are the addresses we use
to find things on the web,
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[#2] HTML, which is the
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HyperText Markup Lanuage
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which is the way that the information
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is stored and sent
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so that we can then use browsers
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to view HTML, and then
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all the documents can be understood
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and then also they display the links
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so that the hypertext part of it works
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and we can jump around from page to page.
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Um, the final part is HTTP, which is
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the HyperText Transfer Protocol
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which is the communication method
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by which the different computers can
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talk to each other and send the
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HTML documents back and forth
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depending on the URLs.
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Um. So, when he built it, there were some
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very important things that he
built into this system
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that didn't exist before.
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And the main one is
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universal authorship.
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So he always intended that anyone
would be able
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to access these webpages,
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and anyone would be able to
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add their own webpages, without
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asking for permission.
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With the very explicit special condition
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that anyone can link to any other webpage
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without permission.
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Previous hypertext systems required that
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basically, for you to link to me,
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I have to accept that link, and
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probably create a link back to you, and
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that wasn't required on the Web, which
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gives us a lot of freedom to link to people
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who wouldn't want us to be able
to link to them, for example,
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so no one can say "I'm putting up free content..."
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"...but you can't send your readers here,
because I hate you," et cetera.
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The other one is that he made it
completely, completely free.
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So in the world of
inter--[fumbles for words]--programming
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the most free thing is generally considered
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to be the GPL [General Public License]:
open-source, free software licenses.
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uh, and Tim Berners-Lee actually almost used
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the GPL, because he wanted the web software
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he was building to be free.
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But at the last minute he actually changed his mind
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and made it full public domain,
because in certain ways
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the GPL is actually more restrictive, because it
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forces other people - like, certain commercial actors
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wouldn't have wanted to use web technology
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if it were GPL, so he made it full public domain,
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and then from there went on to make all of the standards
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as open and, uh, general and free as possible.
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Uh. So that's my extremely brief
history of the internet.
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If anyone is curious, he wrote a wonderful book
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called "Weaving the Web" about his experiences
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[enticing tone] As you can see, it's short!
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And he has lots of interesting technical information
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in it, without being overwhelming.
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It's very approachable
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and he's a really interesting person
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and it - the book is much better than his tweets,
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which are usually incoherent.
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[one of the participants huffs out a "whew"]
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Ellery: Ouch!
Jeremy [?]: A few minutes?
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Ellery: Thanks, that was - that was great, Jer!
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Ellery: I mean, I think that that helps
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um, in conversations about internet policy,
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and internet governance, there's a lot of emphasis
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on the ability to kind of create and innovate
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without permission? Like, for every
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to be able to build parts of the web, and
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what you just laid out for us makes it clear
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how important the Web piece of the infrastructure is
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for that, for that capacity to become
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a real tangible thing, and somebody that -
[amends] something that now
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we can do - we don't have to have
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technical expertise to kind of build our own
spaces there.
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Ellery: Um. So, I wanted to -
Jeremy: So um.
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Jeremy: If I could add just one more thing, sorry -
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Jeremy: I just wanted to give a couple examples
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of things that happen over the internet
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that aren't the web,
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because that was the actual initial question.
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So, one example would be torrents,
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where you're the - two computers
connect to each other,
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and stream information directly, without any URLs
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being mixed into the process.
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Um, another one is - email, at its core,
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is its own communication protocol
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that doesn't have to use the web,
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although we often use web sites
to access and manage our email.
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Umm. And then another one was the one
right before the Web came out,
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a very popular protocol was called Gopher,
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which people liked, and sort of worked like the Web
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- you surf around and find things -
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but it actually became commercial
right around the time that the web came out,
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so people would've had to start paying,
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and instead of starting to pay,
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they switched to HTTP, HTML, and
the World Wide Web.
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Ellery: Thank you.
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Ellery: So I want to move to Alan, now... Um,
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Alan built the first search engine.
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And I'm kind of... like, overwhelmed, and feel sort of
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like, giddy and nervous having him here.
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Ellery: This is just -
[Alan laughs]
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Ellery: This is, like, a really big deal!
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Ellery: So, Alan, just - if you could tell us -
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'cuz I think a lot of people don't know about Archie -
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um, it would be really cool just to hear
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about how you sort of - what you were doing
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that made you decide to, to do this
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and kinda what it was like, and then, I mean,
everything you've seen since...
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Unfortunately we're time limited, but...
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Alan: Right.
Ellery: You know.
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Alan [coughs]: Well, um, uh, well, that was back in
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1989, and, I was working as a system administrator
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for uh, McGill University - I was a grad student
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for McGill University - and um, I was responsible
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for getting software for - one of my responsibilities
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was getting software for the faculty and the students.
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And at the time, the three major
protocols on the internet
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- this was pre Web, ummm -
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was, uh, Telnet, which would allow you to log in
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to a remote machine.
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Email, ah, which would allow you to communicate
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ah, with another - as we do now, with a, with a
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remote machines, plural,
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and, and FTP, which was the File Transfer Protocol,
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which allowed you to move, ah, data files, or files
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from one machine to another.
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And at the time what we had was - people had made
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- remember it was a non-commercial internet
at the time -
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- actually, commercial traffic was forbidden
on the internet at the time,
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because it was run by the
National Science Foundation
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and it was using educational money
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and therefore other than companies with
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research arms, like IBM and HP
and those kinds of things,
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we didn't have any commercial traffic on the internet,
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which nowadays seems kind of amazing
to even think about -
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and, ah, so what people did, were to provide
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to provide free space on their machines
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- and remember, you know, at the time,
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a big disc would be a megabyte, you know -
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and so people would provide common repositories
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that you could deposit programs that you had written
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datafiles, and documents, and that kinda stuff.
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into these central repositories that were
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spread around the internet.
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Then other people could then retrieve them.
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And so I spent a lot of my time trying to locate
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software, or the information that my, the
students and the faculty were trying to find,
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and I got tired of it.
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and since I'm lazy and a geek, I...
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I automated the process.
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I got - instead of doing it manually, I had a bunch
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of scripts wake up in the middle of the night
every night,
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and go out and index files.
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Now remember all of this was just file listings.
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It's not like Google, it's not like
a search engine would be today,
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it is just... filenames. All it was, was filenames.
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And so what it would do
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was it would go out every night,
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list all the filenames in all the repositories,
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and allow you to search lists of filenames.
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And I only used it for myself!
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I only used it, um, uh, for my own personal use.
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Um, and at one point my boss,
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who was also a student, a grad student
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at the University, let Peter Deutsch let it be known
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that, um, somebody was asking for, you know,
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could they, could somebody tell them where, um,
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y'know, a particular piece of software was.
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And, uh, uh, we, um, uh... we, you know,
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he came and asked me,
he knew we had this database
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and he came and asked me if I could help out.
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And I gave it to him, and if, y'know,
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half a sec- half a minute later I had the information,
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and so he put this posting online, and, umm.
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People then started asking,
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"Well, can you find this for me?"
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And, you know, all these manual requests!
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Basically - either through email, or UseNet postings -
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- which is what we were using at the time -
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we thought, this is silly,
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there's no point doing these things manually
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when we can just allow people access
to the database itself.
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And in a moment of insanity,
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we had to come up with a name for it,
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and I said, "Okay, well, let's just call it ARCHI,"
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which is "ARCHIVE" without the V
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And, ah, and within about three or four months
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we were consuming about half
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of all of the traffic to eastern Canada
[where McGill University is]
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as this search engine became - as people, y'know -
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- word of mouth -
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you know, people who know about Archie
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are generally people of a certain age...
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...I won't mention what that age is, but
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it's generally people who were in university
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or working on the internet, so it would have been
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so it would have been research people,
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people in academia in the early nineties.
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So Archie lasted for about, uh, [hems and haws]
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Five years. Four or five years.
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And, um, it only indexed FTP archives.
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It never indexed the web.
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Now, I went on, as Archie became popular,
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and I got more involved in the standards process
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and that kind of stuff,
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I worked, uh, fairly closely with Tim Berners-Lee
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to, uh, to standardize - for example,
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I did the - I ran the committee
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at the standard-setting body for the internet,
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which is the IETF
[Internet Engineering Task Force]
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to standardize URLs.
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Because Tim had come up with
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a set of rules for URLS,
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and as we looked at expanding that
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to a larger range of resources,
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we realized that those rules did not cover
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all of the cases.
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So, we worked, for, uh - Tim brought the,
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the specification, his original specification,
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to the group, and we worked on it for,
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I don't remember, nine months to a year or so,
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to come up with a standard for URLs.
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So all of those URLs that we use,
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day in and day out,
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were, were standardized as a result
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of that committee.
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So, it was, um, it was a really exciting time,
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it was a time of, y'know - the question I always get
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is why didn't make a billion dollars off of it?
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And I keep reminding people