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Joshua Allen wrote:
> I once again note that Eric Bina has virtually been erased from
> the history of web browsers.
How about Chris Wilson? He didn't even get a job at Netscape like
Eric Bina and all the other Illinois folk did...
But, the world seems to have forgotten that Bina, Wilson,
Andreessen, even Tim Berners-Lee were very much late-comers to the world of
hypertext. There are actually people today who believe the popular truth
that one or more of these people "invented" the web! Not even close...
What you won't find virtually anywhere on the web are the names of
people like Per Hamnqvist, Marios Cleovoulou, Leo Laverdure, Ward Clark,
Pascalle Dardaillier, Tim Cowan, Doug Rayner, Jean-Pic Berry, etc. that
worked with me in Valbonne, France for Digital during the 80's on what I
believe was the first practical "wide-area network" hypertext system and
also, to the best of my knowledge, the first WAN hypertext system to be
installed at CERN. (We even sometimes referred to our stuff as a "web".[1])
This stuff was done long before Bina, Andreessen, Wilson, Berners-Lee, etc.
ever released squat... And, we were only one of *many* teams that built
web-like systems back in the days before there were enough machines
connected together for anyone to care about or even notice what we'd done...
While Google's popularity-based ranking may make it difficult to
find the unpopular data on the web, it can't even hope to make it easy to
retrieve the histories that aren't recorded on the web.
bob wyman
[1] If you know the ancient history of Digital's "ALL-IN-1," you'll
understand why it made sense to refer to our "Memex Prototype 1" as
"Charlotte's Web." (Hint: What does CP/OSS stand for?)
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