this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Yeah, absolutely. I experienced BBS culture, and the pre-web internet, and Compuserve, and 100% agree with you. The big revolutionary thing about AOL in those days that distinguished it from something like Compuserve was exactly that it opened up the masses to the cooperative internet, which had previously been a very niche world, and was my opinion vastly superior to anything available on Compuserve or pre-internet AOL.
(What happened to the niche world because of the influx of AOL users and their fellow travelers is a whole different discussion.)
The point that I'm making is that the niche world was already cooperative and decentralized, whereas the guy in the video is making it sound like Tim Berners-Lee was some idealistic nerd who was coming up with something new. HTTP was actually more centralized relatively speaking than what came before it, because your web site could only be served by your own hardware, which wasn't true of e.g. Usenet.