Re: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?
Posted by
Steve Smith on
Mar 21, 2013; 6:17pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Fwd-You-just-went-to-the-Google-homepage-What-actually-happened-tp7582191p7582196.html
Jean-Baptiste
Quéru's (accurate and complete
to my study) description of the details (down to the
physical layer) of what happens when you go to Google's
homepage reminds me of how, roughly 22 years ago, at LANL:
<long-winded technical anecdote>
We wrote a simple PERL script to act as a daemon (a program
running all the time, listening on a logical port
(conventionally 80) on the network) to field this new thing
called the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It would then
parse the request (e.g. "HTTP GET SomeGoodStuff"), whereupon
the daemon did a directory search of the Gopher directory
structure for a directory (or file) at the root named
"SomeGoodStuff"... assuming it was a *directory* rather than
a *file* it then returned the directory listing enclosed in
a <UL> tag and each directory or file name enclosed in
<LI>SubdirectoryOrFileName</LI> tag, sending
that back over the network to whomever so requested it. If
it were a *file*, it would return the contents of the
file. I think this was before MIME types, so the
requesting client was left to decide what to do with the
contents based on some assumptions about the file extension
(.txt, .html, .jpg, etc.) and/or the "Magic
Number" (a simple "signature" in the first several
bytes of the file).
When we redirected the Directory Name Services (DNS) server
for www.lanl.gov and put it up for public access, we alerted
Tim Berner's Lee at CERN and we became the 50th listing on
his homepage of "other
World Wide Web servers. It wasn't long after that that the
Web exploded, growing (geometrically?) to rapidly to follow,
both in number and complexity of servers and in content
type.
Our own Chad Kieffer here
on this list, entered the picture as a freshly minted
Graphic Designer interning at LANL. I helped to teach
him to hand cut HTML along with a half-dozen other
designers there, and within a year, they outstripped
my knowledge of all things Web, along with hundreds of
individuals around LANL learning/creating on their
own. When we retired that PERL Script in favor of an
early Apache (a Patchy) server with dedicated
(including the Gopher branch) content, I was already
losing track of the details that Queru (this has to be
a taken name or a psuedonymn doesn't it?) outlines
here, and I was right smack in the center of that
vortex. As I remember it, Chad took lead on handling
the LANL Science Museum's presence and half a dozen
others took on equally important branches in our
growing bush of nonsense.
In parallel, Alan
Ginsparg was building xxx.lanl.gov which was NOT a
pornography web server, though LANL and DOE administrators
were *sure* it either *was* or would be mistaken *for*
such. It was an archive for scientific papers which would
eventually become what everyone today knows and loves as ARXIV.org. Alan's
xxx.lanl.gov may have been up fielding requests before
www.lanl.gov even, it was hard to reconstruct the history
later down the line. Those of us who saw the barest hint
of the future knew Alan was on to something and that LANL
bureaucrats would do all they could to FF it up. Several of
us went to bat with the administrators to keep them off
Paul's back, but he didn't need any help or protection, he
was a force of nature.
It has been a very short but very long 22 years! I could
dig up a screenshot of one of our early pages (even find a
few of them on Brewster Kahle's Wayback Machine, but they
are quite ugly/clunky and I would just embarass myself). If
you do go to the Wayback
Machine, you will note that LANL was being crawled a
LOT during the 2005-2006 tenure of Retired Admiral Dr. Peter
G. Nanos when Doug was using his Pester Power on HIM.
Sergey and Larry, be VERY afraid!
Others here may be interested in using the Wayback Machine
to traipse down their own "memory lane". Most of us are
used to the web being ephemeral... imagining that if we see
one thing one day that it will be there forever, yet
realizing at the same time that in fact, web pages change
all of the time with no record kept by the web server of the
earlier versions. The Wayback Machine and Internet Archive
has done as much as it could to grab snapshots of the web
(and other internet resources) as often as it can to help
ameliorate that. Only history will tell how well they are
doing!
</long-winded technical
anecdote>
- Steve
Sorry for the double post, but I
thought a bit more info from below the fold of essay would
help:
For non-technologists, this is all a black box.
That is a great success of technology: all those
layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people
can use them without even knowing that they exist at
all. <snip>
That is also why it's so hard for technologists and
non-technologists to communicate together:
technologists know too much about too many layers and
non-technologists know too little about too few layers
to be able to establish effective direct
communication. <snip>
That is why the mainstream press and the general
population has talked so much about Steve Jobs' death
and comparatively so little about Dennis Ritchie's:
Steve's influence was at a layer that most people
could see, while Dennis' was much deeper. <snip>
Finally, last but not least, that is why our patent
system is broken: technology has done such an amazing
job at hiding its complexity that the people
regulating and running the patent system are barely
even aware of the complexity of what they're
regulating and running. <snip>
On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Owen
Densmore
<[hidden email]>
wrote:
From
HN, a pointer to a delightfully clever essay that
would be loved by Nick and others who are often
bewildered by the hacker alphabet soup of acronyms and
buzz words.
Well,
what _does_ happen when you got to a web page?
This has the
possibility of a new book that somehow makes it all
reasonably clear. Maybe.
--
Owen
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com