Stumbling across the very fun asciimaps made me think about the time before ‘the web’ when there was just the Internet. It made be chuckle about all of the talk lately defining web 2.0 as being all about making the web read/write. The funny thing is that before the great Internet land rush brought about by the browser and HTML, the Internet was an intensely read/write place: email, usenet, telnet, gopher, ftp (all from the command line, please). It wasn’t until the proliferation of brochure-ware, me-too web sites that the ‘write’ part of the equation started to fade.
To me, it seems like the ‘web 2.0’ stuff is really just an natural evolution of when web sites discovered the interactive possibilities that a web site could provide via good old CGI-BIN and others. Probably the biggest difference is that the user interface has gotten a bit more sophisticated with DHTML, CSS and Ajax versus the full-page-refresh-to-do-anything mode of initial web sites.
technorati tags: internet, web20, readwriteweb, history