Our task for OpenLearning19 is to annotate this text about the ’30th birthday’ of the web, and to reflect here on the annotations.

What I picked for annotation, are two keywords (Gopher, and Virtual Library curation) of the web history because I am grateful that the text mentions these things that seem almost forgotten already.

Many accounts of the web history sound like the story about a Saint, or as if the web had arrived on a single day like an asteroid. In my memory it was a collective effort of many people and a gradual development of the infrastructures. And I think it is useful to remember this when we are now supposed to collectively fix it.

Here are two older blog posts about my differing experience of this history,

• one about gopher vs. early www,
• another about the virtual library.

If you want more, here is a picture from 1994 (archived later), showing how a browseable ‘virtual’ library catalog could appear much more ‘real’ than a merely searchable card catalog.