by 0 comments on "The Time I Met Bill English"

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This post is to honour the one-year anniversary of the passing of Bill English, at age 91, on 26 July, 2020. English was Doug Engelbart’s right-hand man in the Mother of All Demos in 1968 and a key developer of the oN-Line System (NLS). The post below was initially part of a book I was writing about Engelbart. The book was eventually abandoned, but the memory of meeting English in 2014 remains. As does, I hope, the achievements of those SRI pioneers. RIP, Bill.

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by 1 comment on "1998: Open Season with Mozilla, W3C’s DOM, and WaSP"

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It may seem like Microsoft won the browser war in 1998 (despite a looming anti-trust case), but looking back it, was actually the year the web started to open up. It was when open source projects like Mozilla and open standards like DOM began to steer the web towards a more open, equitable future. It was also the year that a coalition of independent web developers arrived on the scene to promote open standards — The Web Standards Project (WaSP). All of these developments would impact the web’s direction for years to come.

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by 0 comments on "1997: The Year of DHTML"

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DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, was essentially a combination of HTML, JavaScript, the newly released CSS standard, and an emerging web programming model called the DOM (Document Object Model). That said, the precise definition of DHTML depended on which browser company you spoke to: Netscape or Microsoft.

As it turned out, Microsoft’s vision for DHTML was more compelling from a technical perspective than Netscape’s (perhaps the first time that could be said about a web technology Microsoft pioneered — but it would not the last). What Microsoft wanted to achieve with DHTML was to make every element of an HTML document into a programmable object.

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by 0 comments on "1995: PHP Quietly Launches as a CGI Scripts Toolset"

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If CGI scripts were the start of interactive programming on the web, then PHP was the natural next step — at least on the server-side. Just a month after Brendan Eich created the JavaScript scripting language at Netscape, an independent developer from Canada named Rasmus Lerdorf released the first version of a toolset he called Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools). At this point, it wasn’t a scripting language (although it would eventually become one). As of June 1995, when Lerdorf announced the project to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi mailing list, it was a utility library and templating engine for the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). In modern terms, we can think of it as similar to a JavaScript library like React — although obviously much less complicated, since this was 1995.

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by 3 comments on "1993: CGI Scripts and Early Server-Side Web Programming"

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A couple of years before JavaScript was invented, a specification called the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) enabled an early form of interactivity for web pages. While a CGI script wasn’t a dynamic component in the browser, like JavaScript was, it did allow early web users in 1993 and 1994 to run interactive programs. In many ways then, it was CGI — not JavaScript — that was the start of web applications.

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by 0 comments on "1996: Microsoft Activates the Internet With ActiveX & JScript"

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In March 1996, at Microsoft’s annual Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Bill Gates announced a set of internet technologies called ActiveX. “Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing,” he said regarding Microsoft’s approach to the Internet, “[…] is a strong level of integration into Windows.” It was the moment Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and other web-focused companies had feared — Microsoft was embedding the Internet into its powerful Windows ecosystem.

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by 0 comments on "1969: Building the oN-Line System"

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After the Mother Of All Demos in late 1968, solid progress was made in building out the oN-Line System (NLS) over 1969. In a 1970 “final report” by Engelbart and his staff at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), the hardware and software of NLS developed over the past couple of years is outlined. The report states that “the configuration of the ARC computer facility has been relatively stable over the past two years,” but there “have been some peripheral additions, in particular the ARPA network interface and an external core system.”

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