[elondaits]

It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented.

The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.

What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?

[chubot]

There was the WELL, CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, all of which predated the web, and which were all commercial and proprietary services

I was on prodigy and AOL, and then the web

This thread actually shows the curse of inventing things and giving them away: some of the people who benefit from the idea think it is obvious, and some also think that you obviously should have given it away

It’s odd that if you create user-hostile products like Microsoft and Apple, you’re somehow more respected by (some) users

[zenmac]

yes and back then remember there were a battle about how to keep the web open, so the Internet doesn't become an AOL walled garden. Now who really knows AOL.

Now days is about META/GOOGLE apps vs web standard. Just seems like the empire always wants to strike back. We techs better be on watch.

[motbus3]

For me it is funny to remember it differently from you because I used the www much before AOL. When I tried AOL I felt it was so closed and limited. I understood the idea but the WWW was at the same time less professional but also free. I was maybe around 12y or 13y when I tried AOL and by them I was using the www for maybe 3y already.

My family had zero technology knowledge and I only came to know about BBS and other stuff after was an adult and those things were not relevant or dead by then

[daft_pink]

I think the fact that these services existed is actually the point.

If you charged for the world wide web, you would never have beaten compuserve and aol, both of which I used before the internet.

[giancarlostoro]

> It’s odd that if you create user-hostile products like Microsoft and Apple, you’re somehow more respected by (some) users

The respect is for the bits they get right more than anything.

[macNchz]

Minitel comes to mind as a genuinely popular predecessor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

I’ve heard it blamed for stunting France’s later adoption of the internet, because people were able to do many useful things on it and didn’t have as compelling a reason to get online to the internet as they did in other countries with no similar system.

[pavlov]

Before the WWW, the leading large-scale hypertext project was Xanadu:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

It was decidedly non-free. The code was owned by Autodesk, and the protocol was supposed to include micro-transactions applied to all content access so that authors would always get paid.

[1dom]

There were quite a few, I think. It depends who you ask as to which was the leading one.

There was also Microcosm, HyperG and others. The Web was notable amongst them in avoiding money and licensing sort of stuff altogether (e.g. Xanadu made a point about micropayments for lots of content, and I think many of the others fell to the temptation of catering to cash in some way or other).

[mc32]

In a way it was more mature in the sense of what makes the world go round.

Without money data centers and infrastructure don’t happen.

So now instead of microtransactions we get plastered with ads ad nauseam.

[simpaticoder]

Gopher was the early front-runner for a hypertext system. However it was proprietary (UMN owned if, IIRC) which meant you needed a license to write a client or server that used the protocol. HTTP came along and ate its lunch.

[goku12]

According to Wikipedia, UMN only announced that they would charge for their implementation of Gopher. They said nothing about the protocol and its competing implementations. But this ambiguity made people a bit apprehensive and this proved costly for Gopher at a time when WWW was actively competing with them. TBL and CERN capitalized on this by unamiguously opening the standard, while the Mosaic browser became competitive with Gopher implementations.

[ACS_Solver]

I think it's not meant in contrast with proprietary standards, but (if you look at the book blurb) in contrast with people like Gates and Jobs. Bill Gates invented some things but is mostly known for taking his inventions, and those of others, to great commercial success. Steve Jobs never invented anything but was extremely successful at packaging existing tech into usable products people would buy.

Tim Berners-Lee on the other hand never attempted to turn the WWW into a product to sell, or make a browser company, or anything of the sort.

[skeeter2020]

I also thought of it through the lens of comparing him to Marc Andreessen, who played a huge role in the open internet with Mosaic and Netscape and now sits at the far, far other end of the spectrum with his VC investments and government involvement. It's plausible that Berners-Lee could have followed a similar trajectory and notable that he has not.

[ab5tract]

He didn’t invent anything either, though. www is just a less-than-half implementation of Xanadu.

EDIT: To be clear, I don’t intend that as a knock against Sir Berners-Lee. But the post I’m responding to invokes a false dichotomy.

[mikewarot]

Ward Christensen always said that Xmodem was popular specifically because he didn't charge for it. (He worked at IBM, and didn't want to risk his job, so it had to be non-commercial)

I think the trend is likely to repeat on any system you care to examine.

[pjmlp]

Compuserve, Prodigy and original AOL come to mind, as places we used to hang out before WWW.

Many magazines used to have an editor note with the ID on them for online forums, regarding the articles.

[insane_dreamer]

CompuServe was closed/proprietary/non-"free". AOL too.