The Web That Never Was - Dylan Beattie

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Published 2018-11-13

The story of the web is a story about freedom. It's a story about information, about breaking down barriers, about creating new ways for people to communicate, to collaborate, and to share their ideas. It’s also a story that has as much do with marketing, money and meetings as it does with research and innovation. It’s a story of mediocre ideas that succeeded where brilliant ideas failed, a story of compromises, rushed deadlines and last-minute decisions. And it could so easily have been very, very different.
What if IBM had hired Digital Research instead of Microsoft to develop the operating system for their first PC, way back in 1980? What if Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark had gone to work for Nintendo in 1993 and never founded Netscape? What if one of the team at CERN had said “Tim, won’t it sound a bit silly if everyone spends the next fifty years saying double-you-double-you-double-you all the time”?

In this talk, Dylan Beattie will explore alternative history of the world wide web - a web with no Microsoft, no Windows; no Firefox, no Google and no JavaScript. A software industry from another timeline, a world of platforms, protocols and programming languages that are unmistakably alien - and yet strangely familiar.

So strap in, hold tight, and join us as take you on a journey through... the web that never was.

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All Comments (21)

@nfistfu 3 years ago

I like the way that this actually takes a look at real life pivotal historic decisions and actually tries to piece together what would have happened if things had gone differently, rather than just coming up with random nonsense.
@thygrrr 2 years ago

It was clear we live in the stupidest, boringest timeline, but thank you for making the point elaboratively and entertainingly.
@Cyberfoxxy 2 years ago

25:18 that HTML 0.2 syntax looks absolutely incredible. I'm actually tempted to write an interpreter for that.
@keiyakins 1 year ago

"John Romero, who's quite good at level design and having great hair..." This may be the single truest description of Romero I've ever heard.
@getdavemoore 3 years ago

watching this guy's hour long presentations back to back, a great storyteller!
@intangiblematter_misc 2 years ago

Okay but actually that alternate HTML with ~{} instead of <> looks so nice to work with
@dross6206 3 years ago

4:00 “Code in VB once, but stop before it makes you stupid.” Me: *Glancing over at my boss who refuses to allow us to switch from VB to C#...
@dewdop 3 years ago

That song was terrific. For those who are unaware, it's a parody of "Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen," by Baz Luhrmann.
@Ellygator 2 years ago

This is the best fairytale of Computer history. Loved it
@SirLasterOfDesaster 2 years ago

OMG...it took me like 52 of those 61 minutes to realize this is a "What If?" presentation 😅
@VivekPatel-ze6jy 10 months ago

18:11 almost reminds me of ao3 (non-profit fanfiction site aka archive or our own), where tags on a piece of writing are added by the author and then sorted by volunteers, who make synonymous tags redirect to the preferred one, and create parent tags, allowing users to apply a dizen filters and find exactly what they want to read. Very different vibe to algorithmic search engines
@jbird4478 2 years ago

The number of timelines wherein Javascript exists is probably similar to the number of alternate universes where the platypus is a thing.
@recarsion 11 months ago

This might be the single best tech talk I have ever seen. So captivating and exciting especially since these things very well could have happened. And omg, that alternate version of HTML, I'll never be able to look at a closing tag again without puking, and Lisp instead of Js, and Java never taking off...
@maxlife459 13 days ago

Every once in a while I come back to this talk, and every time I rewatch this I just feel sad with the sack of mud we got instead. :(
@fauxpas5598 10 months ago

I'm such a nerd I literally got a full-body chill at 43:06 when that logo appeared.
@sonickrnd 4 years ago

I for one, fell in love with those brand new NEXT PALM handheld PCs, small size, robust body, long battery life and powerful computing abilities with classic GRID browser. What else can I need?
@edgeeffect 3 years ago

In Dylan's alternative universe, I would have been FORCED to use Lisp by now, and I'd have had to learn to get over my distaste for all those parenthesis-es. I always found "WWW" highly amusing because when I was at college, two of the other students always used "WWW" as their software "brand name" - which was based on a quote from Derek and Clive and stood for "Winkie Wanky Woo".
@ErikHolten 3 years ago

Really well researched. The two Johns had me laughing.
@d3xbot 9 months ago

I love this spec-fic universe you've built! I'm a Mac/Linux guy today, but would I have been a BeOS guy? A NEXT guy? Or would I have gotten in with CP/M and MP/M? Would Linux have been a project or would other OSes have taken over before there was such a need for a free UNIX-like OS? I'm sure with the multi-media chops Be would've brought to Apple, they'd've come up with something iPod-like, but I wonder how integrated multi-media would be in the GRID?
@MichaelKathke 3 years ago

Great SciFi novel from an alternative universe in our multiverse.