Month: August 2011

So, we just talked about the 30th anniversary of the IBM PC, now, the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Wide (to be clear, the Internet itself, apart from the Web, is much older!) And, as usual, your friendly Computer Curmudgeon remembers it as though it were yesterday! Note, that the main article I link to was posted YESTERDAY as I type this!

20 years ago today, the World Wide Web opened to the public

“Today is a significant day in the history of the Internet. On 6 August 1991, exactly twenty years ago, the World Wide Web became publicly available. Its creator, the now internationally known Tim Berners-Lee, posted a short summary of the project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup and gave birth to a new technology which would fundamentally change the world as we knew it.

The World Wide Web has its foundation in work that Berners-Lee did in the 1980s at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He had been looking for a way for physicists to share information around the world without all using the same types of hardware and software. This culminated in his 1989 paper proposing ‘A large hypertext database with typed links’.

While the initial proposal failed to gain much momentum within CERN, it was later expanded into a more concrete document proposing a World Wide Web of documents, connected via hypertext links. World Wide Web was adopted as the project’s name following rejected possibilities such as ‘The Mine of Information’ and ‘The Information Mesh‘. The May 1990 proposal described the concept of the Web as thus:

HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, HyperText provides a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help. We propose the implementation of a simple scheme to incorporate several different servers of machine-stored information already available at CERN, including an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments.

The document envisaged the Web as being used for a variety of purposes, such as ‘document registration, on-line help, project documentation, news schemes and so on.’ However, British Berners-Lee and his collaborator Robert Cailliau, a Belgian engineer and computer scientist, had the foresight to avoid being too specific about its potential uses.”

Man! It was fun while it lasted! The “IE Users Are Dumber” Study trues out to be an elaborate hoax. OR, this revelation is a Microsoft plant to discredit the real study! Yeah! Maybe that’s it! Thanks to a faithful reader for forwarding this on to me!

Whew! Study was a hoax, IE users not dumb after all

“Highly publicized research that found Internet Explorer users tend to have a lower IQ than those who use other browsers, has turned out to be an elaborate hoax.

Major media outlets around the world, including CTVNews.ca, BBC, CNN and Forbes, jumped on the quirky data last week after it was released by a Vancouver-based firm calling itself ApTiquant.

It is still unclear who is responsible for the stunt, but the ApTiquant website has been updated to reflect the fact the study was a scam designed to draw attention to the flaws of IE6.

‘ApTiquant was set up in late July 2011, in order to launch a fake ‘study’ called ‘Intelligent Quotient and Browser Usage,” the website’s homepage now states.

‘The study took the IT world by storm. The main purpose behind this hoax was to create awareness about the incompatibilities of IE6, and not to insult or hurt anyone.

The research, now known to be fake, was purportedly based on online testing of 100,000 invited participants.

It claimed that users of any version of Internet Explorer tended to have a lower intelligence quotient than respondents who used Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

“From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist change/upgrade of their browsers,’ the report suggested.

It eventually emerged that the website for the company had only been set up in the past month. Upon closer inspection the BBC reported that the images found on ApTiquant’s website had been copied from a French research firm Central Test.

The note now posted on the ApTiquant site says ApTiquant is not related to Central Test, the French company, in any way.”

So, Adobe is behind Flash. HTML 5 replaces Flash. Now Adobe is bringing out a tool to work with HTML 5 instead of Flash (or, more exactly, in addition to Flash… hummmmm…)

Adobe Edge Information

“Adobe® Edge is a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3.

Edge will be updated regularly to add new functionality, stay ahead of evolving web standards, and incorporate user feedback to provide the best functionality and experience possible. This is an early look at Edge with more capabilities to come.”

PC Magazine says: “Adobe released a preview version of Edge, an HTML5 development tool that will allow Web developers to build those ‘little beautifully designed jewels on the Web featuring animations,’ according to Devin Fernandez, Adobe Group product manager. As PCMag software analyst Michael Muchmore noted, Edge is something of an acknowledgement by the premier design software house that the Web is moving away from Flash to focus on open-standard HTML5 and its many sub-standards, which are capable of creating the same effects in a non-proprietary manner via compliant Web browsers, without a plug-in.

But in a Monday blog post, Jack Nack, principal product manager at Adobe, dismissed the notion that Edge will produce a face-off between Flash and HTML5.

‘It’s worth noting that both Dreamweaver & GoLive were pushing Web animation starting in the 90’s, that Adobe championed SVG early on, and that it has been a main contributor helping to improve jQuery and lots of other HTML/JS/CSS tech,” he wrote. “Point is, Adobe’s been driving both rich, animated HTML5 and Flash for 15 years, and the company will keep evolving both to address different customer needs.’

Also yesterday, Adobe released Expressive Web, which showcases the features and functionality available with HTML5 and CSS3. ‘Look for future Edge updates as we integrate new features over the next few months, with commercial release slated for 2012,’ Brady wrote.”

Read more: Adobe Edge Tops 50K Downloads in 24 Hours

Talk about making a guy feel OLD! I was in the computer field BEFORE the IBM PC came out… I remember getting one at work and thinking, “Wow! How cool is this!” All 4.77 mHz (NOT GHz!) of it! Sigh. So, happy 30th, PC!

The IBM PC, One Of The Most Important Milestones In Computing History, Just Turned 30 Years Old

“It was August 1981 when IBM released the Personal Computer Model 5150. Costing $1,265, it didn’t have a monitor, parallel ports or even a hard disk. To the casual observer, it was more of a box than a computer.
But it sold like crazy, even after the wild success of other revolutionary computers, like the Apple II in 1977 and the Atari 800 in 1979.

The 5150’s open architecture and use of third-party hardware and software certainly had something to do with its success, but we can’t help but feel like the over-the-top marketing campaign with a Charlie Chaplin lookalike played a role as well.

This computer was the first one to be a truly open system — it was customizable, users could install whatever they wanted and easily write their own software. Internally, the machine boasted a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor and a 256K RAM.

Of course these specs sound like a joke compared to modern hardware, but they were groundbreaking for their time. Impressive work, considering it was designed by a team of just 12 people working out of Florida.”