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Back from a long string theory of travel.

From Graham Spencer (http://gr.ah.am an internet instantiation of will,i,am):

Why did the web win?

We have 13K Internet protocols. It’s like a fossil record. TCPmux is extinct, but still on the list.

By 2009, there’s a huge loss of diversity.
Back in 93, FTP dominated. The FTP state machine has 185 transitions. Lots of messages and states. Turning into code is complicated. Variation to v2.0 is tough.
IMAP: 153 transitions
NNTP: 362 transitions
Conversational protocols are complicated.

http 0.9: few features, but simple.
The state machine has 4 states! An entire http server could fit into one SMS message.

Richard Gabriel: worse is better. Implementation simplicity is the highest priority. “Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.” Simplicity is the most important adaptation.

Other protocols evolve by changing endpoints.
Web evolves by adding intermediaries (proxy, search, social apps).

Ecosystem of intermediaries.

20 year predictions:
1) web protocols will remain simple. Browser from today will be able to view most websites 20 years from now.
2) The ecosystem of the web will keep getting better.
3) The appstore is anomaly. More devices will speak http

5 responses to “Do you know the way to Santa Fe?”

  1. TomiTapio Avatar
    TomiTapio

    Hmm… I remember the annoying KERMIT protocol back from the modem days.

    I say today’s browsers will have major problems with the 20-years-from-now Flash and other embedded video playing bits. Ads will be interactive, conversational, and annoying.

    Reply
  2. photon~wave Avatar
    photon~wave

    Moreover, the problems will continue with browser-dependent contents…

    "Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’
    label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days,
    before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading
    a document written on another computer, another word
    processor, or another network."
    — Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

    "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign

    Reply
  3. AcroYogi Avatar
    AcroYogi

    Steve-
    I re-posted this to my PlayMotion alumni group, a global cabal of wicked smart engineers… my god, it started quite a fire!!

    the best response (so far) to the challenge of implementing an "entire http server… into one SMS message:"

    ruby -rsocket -e ‘s=TCPServer.new(5**5);loop{_=s.accept;_<<"HTTP/1.0 200 OKrnrn#{File.read(_.gets.split[1])rescue nil}";_.close}’

    G
    http://www.gregroberts.com

    Reply
  4. AMagill Avatar
    AMagill

    The web also won because it turned out to work quite well as an abstraction layer for other services. Many of the greatest advances in computer and information technology are really just new layers of abstraction that created platforms on which clever people could invent applications.

    Alan Turing abstracted away complex, purpose-built computing machines into relatively simple general-purpose computers. The Internet abstracts away specialized lines of communication (phone, TV, mail) into one general-purpose pipe. The Web abstracts away purpose-built Internet clients into one general-purpose application platform. The concept of The Cloud seems to abstract away your means of accessing those applications, be it by phone, virtually any Internet-connected computer in the world, or even a singing, Twitter reading fish.

    Reply
  5. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    cool. direct link

    Reply

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