{"id":6834,"date":"2021-12-02T23:25:38","date_gmt":"2021-12-02T23:25:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/?p=6834"},"modified":"2021-12-03T01:40:16","modified_gmt":"2021-12-03T01:40:16","slug":"the-tiny-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/the-tiny-web\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tiny Web"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"EWEC\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1988-9 I led a project to make an electronic version of the Whole Earth Catalog. The Whole Earth Catalog was a compendium of thousands of user-reviews printed on cheap newsprint and mailed to subscribers. It was an early pre-internet printed on paper. The idea, in 1988, was to take this venerable Catalog of ideas and products, and to be able to quickly search for, browse, and navigate through them in a non-linear non-book way. So this Electronic Whole Earth Catalog would have not just be a digital copy (as merely scanned online), but would want to be an interactive, non-linear, new thing.<\/p>\n

A year earlier, Bill Atkinson, one of the co-creators of the Macintosh at Apple,\u00a0inspired by an LSD trip,\u00a0released\u00a0HyperCard. This as an app for the Mac that was organized around the metaphor of\u00a0 3×5 cards. Words on cards could be linked to other cards, in a million different ways. The text was hyperlinked. You can\u00a0surf along the links from one idea to another. More importantly, you could make up as many cards and links as you wanted. HyperCard was the first consumer instantiation of Ted Nelson’s idea of hypertext and hyperlinks. Today we recognize this hyperlinking as the web. But in the case of HyperCard this linking all happened within the confines of one computer. This tiny web was not connected to the internet.<\/p>\n

Besides offering HyperCard for free to any Mac user, Apple had also just released an Apple CD-Rom drive. Now anyone could access the immense storage of data available on a new device called a CD-Rom.\u00a0 A CD contained an insane amount of data \u2014 like 190 MBs! The problem for Apple was that there were zero CD-Roms\u00a0all ready to play, so who is gonna buy an expensive CD driver? This chicken and egg problem of needing developers to create content for a new device or platform is now a standard biz development challenge. Steve Jobs was a huge fan of the Whole Earth Catalog, and he would later rave about it in his Stanford commencement address, but he had already left Apple. Another fan of Whole Earth at Apple was Mike Liebhold. He correctly assessed that the Catalog was kind of ready-made for hyperlinking. And it was vast, so it could fill a CD-Rom. And it was still popular. He approached Stewart Brand and us at Whole Earth and after a few meetings Apple decided to fund the creation of an hyperlinked version of the Whole Earth built on HyperCard and issued on a CD-Rom. This Catalog CD, Apple believed,\u00a0 would be one of the reasons to buy an Apple CD-Rom Driver.<\/p>\n

Apple assigned some ace programers to the project (like Tim Oren and Ted Kaehler) and we assigned a project manager and editors (Like Keith Jordan, Kathleen O’Neill,\u00a0 Richard Schuffler, among others), and then began the huge task of digitizing images and re-keyboarding all the text (since\u00a0nothing was\u00a0digitized before). Everything was squeezed onto virtual 3×5 cards. We were even able to add sound files in the music section. Then the really fun part began of designing the user interface. How do you navigate through this ocean of material? How do you see how much of the catalog you have not seen yet? When do you leave a section? What does “going back” mean? How do you get back to somewhere you’ve been? To someone today who grew up on the web, these kind of questions seem obvious or cute, but in 1989 we wrestled with them. How do you search for anything? Oh, you need a search engine, which we made.<\/p>\n

The final product had maybe 4,000 cards and was the largest set of HyperCards made and the largest hyperlinked document before Tim Berners-Lee got the world-wide web going a\u00a0year\u00a0later.\u00a0 The EWEC never sold very many copies, in part because Apple never sold very many CD drivers. And of course once the web exploded, the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog was seen as a tiny self-enclosed web \u2014 not the world-wide version you really wanted.\u00a0 But for a short time, those of us who worked on it were able to experience that weird\/wonderful experience you get surfing along a string of links, following a flow state as you explore a vast possibility space at your own speed and interests.<\/p>\n

I recently dug up my only copy of EWWC,\u00a0 and made a copy it for the Internet Archive. Some folks there uploaded it with a Mac Plus emulator, and so you too can\u00a0now enjoy\u00a0the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog<\/a>\u00a0online at the Internet Archive. Download and play like you were back in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

It’s thrilling to see it 30 years later. No color, tiny pages, slow.\u00a0\u00a0It was\u00a0the Tiny Web \u2014the web before the web.<\/p>\n

P.S. I onced asked the Apple crew why, after having invented HyperCard \u2014\u00a0a hyperlinked\u00a0web \u2014 they did not go onto\u00a0make\u00a0the world-wide web distributed onto the internet.\u00a0 They were all net savy. Their answer boils down to this: 1) A few people had tried\u00a0a web on the internet\u00a0(Owl and others) and they failed, and 2) Apple could not see a business case for doing so. What would you sell?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1988-9 I led a project to make an electronic version of the Whole Earth Catalog. The Whole Earth Catalog was a compendium of thousands of user-reviews printed on cheap newsprint and mailed to subscribers. It was an early pre-internet … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6834"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6834"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6863,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6834\/revisions\/6863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}