Sorry but The Comment is the atomic matter of the internet. Before your complicated "http web pages" existed, we were sending each other comments, on talkd, on email, on newsgroups, on irc, on BBS. Personal web pages are just your generation's version of a BBS user news file.
BBS were very much a foundational building block of the internet, yes. As a former Discourse employee I’ve been effectively trying to bring back that bygone era.
But Usenet et.al. predates the world-wide-web by a decade, and In this piece I’m subtly making the case that WWW is when the internet first took material form, becoming visible to the naked eye.
www is just the easily visible part of the internet that everyone could access. Usenet, BBS, email etc are all non-www parts of the internet that were more important in its early history but harder to access because you couldn't just point one program at them. www just happened to evolve fast enough that it could emulate the old layers, e.g. Hotmail is the thing that kept emails alive past 1995. I'm sure that without a www front end email would have gone the way of gopher.
I love this! Robin Sloan has been encouraging people to think in these directions this year, and is trying to help these inventors find each other: https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenues/
I have my own contribution to this conversation but I want to explain it in a big splashy blog post.
I loved that article. It partially inspired this writeup, although the idea of Weird predates that piece. I tried to take him up on his offer to showcase projects of this kind in his newsletter, but haven’t heard back yet. (No hard feelings! Maybe he’ll serendipitously bump into this and be reminded.)
