NeXT

Halt and Catch Fire 3×10

& Donna: Glad you’re here.

& Donna: Okay, let’s just hold off for a second on trying to talk about what the World Wide Web is and let’s focus on what it could do...

& Gordon: America Online. What kind of name is that, anyways?

& Joe: Remember, the World Wide Web and NSFNET, or the Internet, or whatever you want to call it, are two different things. The Web runs on top of the Internet. It unifies everything. It makes it one network.

& Joe: ...And it’s running on state-of-the-art NeXT hardware and software.
    Gordon: That’s my biggest problem.
    Joe: NeXTSTEP is not a problem; it’s perfect. ... The NeXT is a state-of-the-art system.
    Gordon: Designed by a disgraced megalomaniac who loves form over function. No wonder you love the NeXT.

& Gordon: Look, if we’re talking about a network that lives exclusively on a ridiculously overpriced machine that doesn’t really play nice with anything else in the technological landscape, what we’re really looking at... is this.

& Gordon: Hey, guys, we are early. ... We are years and years early on this. ... Okay, the World Wide Web could be the next best thing since sliced bread. But right now, it’s a tiny little academic petri dish running on a NeXT computer.
    Tom: In Europe.

& Donna: Just... let’s not lose the shared idea here. There’s a shared protocol. This is a universal language.
    Gordon: So it’s Esperanto.
    Tom: What the heck is Esperanto?
    Cameron: It’s a language for idiots that failed.

& Joe: Okay, so, Hypertext Conference. Berners-Lee was there and he was talking to anyone who would listen. He handed out the entire Web toolkit, the transfer protocol, the mark-up language, the server software, everything.

& Joe: I’m actually talking about HTML, the mark-up language. What’s so interesting about it is its simplicity. With a very basic set of rules, you can create pages of information, objects, and eventually media when the bandwidth increases.

---

& Joe: Berners-Lee handed out guidebooks not only for HTML, but HTTP, the transfer protocol, the call-and-response process for moving information like this across to potential networks.
    Tom: Addressing protocol is TCP/IP.
    Joe: But HTTP is the abstraction application layer protocol that sits on top of TCP/IP symbiotically, right, Tom? With HTTP, any machine can become a client, any machine can become a server, easily exchanging files.
    Tom: No, files are FTP, as in File Transfer Protocol. It’s the one that has «file» in the name of it.

& Joe: I’d like to get back to an important point... simplicity. Both HTML and HTTP are breathtakingly simple. And this kind of elegance allows for versatility, it allows for universality... And the best part is, the online catalogue viewer, the transfer protocol, the Web server software, all of it is free.

& Tom: I have a problem with open source... Because open source allows the lunatics to run the asylum. And every time... every time... you put well-made code out into the world, for people to screw around with, it causes major problems.

& Cameron: Or you could look at it a different way. That with everyone creating something like the Web together, some potentially amazing things could happen.
    One, it gets built very fast.
    Two, it becomes huge in size.
    Three, it’s constantly being edited and refined, so it’s improving at a massive rate.
    And four... there’s no overlord controlling things.

& Cameron: I’m so sick of hearing about the future... The future is just another crappy version of the present. It’s some bribe people offer you to make you do what they want instead of what you want.

& Cameron: Permission to come aboard?
    Bosworth: ... Permission granted.

& Bosworth: Well, Donna says it’s a pretty hot idea. Had to be to get all you yokels in the same room again.

& Gordon: The key to the bisque is the Parmesan toast.
    Donna: Four years ago, the only Parmesan you knew about was powdered.

& Joe: You’re all here. Let’s get started. Berners-Lee wrote HTML to view and edit the Web, HTTP so that it could talk to itself. The chatter could be cacophonous. It could be deafeningly silent. Big picture... what will the World Wide Web become? Short answer... who knows?

& Joe: We don’t have to build a big white box or a stadium, or invent rock and roll. The moment we decide what the Web is, we’ve lost. The moment we try to tell people what to do with it, we’ve lost. All we have to do is build a door and let them inside.

& Joe: ... And that is the best part of the trip... the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending.

& Joe: It takes up one whiteboard... that’s basic concrete and steel. But we can take this and we can build a door, and we can be the first ones to do it. Because right now, everyone else sees this as...
    Donna: As an online research catalogue.
    Gordon: Running on NeXT.
    Cameron: On a network in Europe.
    Joe: And with this handful of code, we can build the Holland Tunnel.

& Gordon: The DSP in this cube is amazing. Not only are we getting clean 56K, we can do this at the same time... Sounds pretty good, huh?

& Gordon: You know, seven grand a pop is still insane, and I don’t know why the cube is magnesium, but I still appreciate a good machine.
    Donna: Yeah, well... you know what they say, software comes and goes...
    Gordon: But hardware is forever.

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