Yesterday by chance I logged into a Yahoo! Mail account I hadn’t used in a while, and lo and behold there was a notice from Yahoo! that stated GeoCities would be officially closing October 26.

Many of you will think, "Yeah? So?"

The deal here is that it’s a final notice, as in the last one. For anybody that uses GeoCities that didn’t receive it, they won’t get any warning whatsoever that their web site(s) are going to be deleted forever.

I sent a copy of this email over to Jason Scott (he’s big into computer and internet history,) who made a blog post of his own about it. The people who cherish computer history aren’t exactly too happy with Yahoo! these days given their rampage of service closures (Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Pets, Yahoo! Live, etc. – all gone.)

This at least isn’t as bad as when AOL Hometown got the axe, because now at least with GeoCities, people have some warning outside of a cold, terse Yahoo! notice.

I know some of you are thinking, "It’s GeoCities. Who cares?"

The closure of GeoCities is no different than if MySpace, Facebook or Twitter shut their doors on you. Many of you put a whole lot of effort into those social media sites, and I guarantee few to none of you have any backups of your messages (or anything else for that matter) on that system. If any of those sites closed, you have no choice but to simply lose everything. All your friend connections, all your in-system messages, all the photos, videos and so on – gone.

Kind of gives you that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, doesn’t it?

Web sites that are big-n’-social now can turn into a future "GeoCities 2.0," if you will. This is already happening with MySpace. Do you think when they inevitably close that they’ll give anybody a way to back up their stuff? Probably not.

Most people don’t realize that sites like GeoCities, Facebook and everything in between is part of internet and computer history. When any part of it goes away, it usually never comes back. This directly goes against one of the single largest advantages of the internet, that being the ability to store mountains upon mountains of information at the lowest possible cost. But instead of taking advantage of this, we usually throw it away without a second thought.

This is how we treat our own history?

Yesterday the computer mouse – something we all have – officially turned 40. If you want to check out the history of the mouse, Gearlog has got you covered.

But for a PCMech article I’m going to throw in my personal experiences with Ye Olde Computer Mouse. Continued

The internet as we know it today predominantly runs on Linux. There’s an extremely high probability that the internet connection you’re using right now is connected thru a Linux server – and routed thru many other Linux servers along the way.

Below is a graph showing the market share for top servers across all domains from August 1995 to September 2008 – from news.netcraft.com.

You’ll notice that Apache has a huge lead over anything else out there. The only other type that comes anywhere near it is Microsoft.

While it’s true the HTTP server from Apache has a Windows version, the one used the most without any hint of doubt is the *nix release.

Why was it that Linux (and Unix) paved the way for the modern internet and not something else?

Two reasons:

1. Cost.
2. The ability of Linux to "act enterprise" without needing enterprise-grade computer hardware.

Imagine the following scenario:

It’s 1994. You get the idea that you want to run your own dial-up ISP. You need the "leased pipe" (the primary internet connection from the phone carrier, usually T1), a computer to act as the server and a bunch of serial-connected dial-up modems (via digiboard most likely) to receive the calls for that server to give your customers connectivity. And of course a bunch of phone lines from the local carrier for your modems.

The computer you use is obviously not going to be some $10,000+ super-duper server because you simply don’t have the cash for it. Rather, it’s going to be whatever you can afford that will get the job done.

And all you’ve got is a 486 DX2 66MHz box – which at the time was modern.

It’s 1994 and you need a server-grade OS. What’s available?

Windows NT 3.1 did exist but wasn’t exactly equipped to do what you wanted. And there was no way MS-DOS with Windows 3.1 could do the job.

Apple’s MacOS was only at System 7.1 in 1994, so that was a no-go.

What’s left? Unix and Linux.

Any Unix was too proprietary at the time – assuming you could even get your hands on a copy of the OS.

For you nit-pickers out there, yes it’s true there were BSD distros in ‘94 – but it wasn’t exactly easy to get a hold of. For those interested, read up on 386BSD, the predecessor to Free/Open/NetBSD.

Then there’s Linux. You had a few choices at the time. Slackware, Red Hat, Debian (of course) and maybe a few others.

At this point you acquired the Linux OS of your choice from a friend on floppy diskettes, installed it, configured the server and gave it the best shot you could. Your Linux "server" had absolutely no GUI because it had to be 100% optimized for speed (and for the fact it was never meant to be a server).

God willing, if your "server" didn’t choke on a daily basis and your customers stayed customers, you made enough of a profit to cover the T1 line cost and upgrade to a real server later on.

~ ~ ~

This story is more or less how modern internet started. There were thousands of Mom n’ Pop ISPs that operated out of a garage (sometimes literally) just like this – and the vast majority of them were all running Linux. Windows couldn’t do it back then and neither could MacOS.

Linux was literally the only OS out there that had the right price (free), ran similar to a Unix and could use existing computers of the time to connect customers. Anything else would break the bank way too easily. What would you have used that you could afford? Netware? Lotus Domino? HP-UX (that requires those refrigerator-sized HP servers)? I don’t think so.

In addition, those who ran web sites also followed suit. They used plain-jane consumer grade PCs "upgraded" to servers (by OS and nothing more usually) to run things like HTTP servers, IRC, FTP, electronic mail and so on.

Would the internet as we know it exist without Linux?

Absolutely not. Where Linux shines the most is in its server applications – no question.

In a few short months it’s going to be 2009, and a ton of stuff has changed in the world of computing over the past almost-ten years. Some of the modern advancements have proven to be a notable improvement while others still produce the same crapola they did nearly ten years ago.

In this installment we’ll be looking at something everyone has in their computer, a Central Processing Unit, better known by its abbreviation as the CPU.

In the last article written about this on PCMech (which was a really long time ago), microprocessors were discussed up to the 386, so we’ll start from the 486 to present.

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Literally defined, a "killer application" a.k.a. a "killer app" is software that is revolutionary and popular (must be both).

In layman’s terms, a killer app is the software giving you the reason to use a computer (or possibly a specific computer) in the first place.

The history of killer apps basically have two generations, that being pre-internet and post-internet.

Pre-internet

In the days where personal computers didn’t connect to any outside networks (other than BBSes), there were two primary applications people used at home. The word processor and the spreadsheet application.

When most people think of word processing they think of Microsoft Word. However this was not the "big" word processing app back then. Most people at home used WordPerfect. And being that this was in DOS it looked rather terrible because there wasn’t any WYSIWYG. But it did work and work well. If not WordPerfect they used an app called Text in DeskMate.

The Apple Lisa (predecessor to the Macintosh) did in fact have a word processor with WYSIWYG called LisaWrite. However few people owned the Lisa machine because it was geared towards business customers and cost $10,000 for the system.

In the word of spreadsheets most people think of Microsoft Excel, but the killer app in pre-internet days was Lotus 1-2-3. On Apple systems as well as other 8-bit systems the popular spreadsheet app was VisiCalc.

A primary effort was put on publishing and home business in pre-internet times, because said honestly there wasn’t much else you could do with a personal computer unless you were a programmer.

Post-internet

The primary application, that being the killer app, in post-internet times is something you’re probably using right now – the web browser.

The web browser by itself does nothing. It literally is a software version of the yesteryear dumb terminal. Without internet connectivity it is useless. But with connectivity it is your gateway to the internet – just like a dumb terminal is useless without its connectivity.

There has been nothing introduced to computers since the web browser that qualifies as the application people use most on their computers from the moment they turn them on. It has even superseded word processing and spreadsheet applications as most-used.

When you think about it, is there an app you use more than a web browser? Probably not.

Additionally, all the spreadsheet’ing and word processing you do can be done via the web browser. This "dumb" software is the one tool you cannot possibly be without if you use a computer at all.

The future

What will the next killer app be? Hard to say.

But what is being said right now – and has been said for quite a while – is that web browsers are still rather terrible and desperately need to change.

Google Chrome is an example of what direction the internet might be heading towards. The direction it indicates is both cool and scary and the same time.

The cool part: It is a browser that works near-perfectly with services provided by the #1 web site in the world.

The scary part: It heavily leans towards a proprietary internet that shuts out other sites in one fell swoop. Granted, nothing works better than proprietary software – but that’s not what the internet is about.

It’ll be interesting, no doubt there.