Oddbean new post about | logout
 💯

I keep hearing people wondering if Nostr is doomed or dead already because use growth isn't an up and right exponential trend. 

The web was invented in 1989! Let that sink in for a moment. It was a full 10 years before the first major internet bubble made "the web" mainstream.

Be patient. Keep building.

nostr:note1dn9avg7qwdjwdyfxsxrqwpgeh2etrkawvq7ldcvvlk8ckzcr0e3stdhrr2  
 email first appeared in its early forms in the late 60s!

it didn't become common until the late 90s

and yeah, i remember the birth of hypertext... on my computer, back in 1989, the new Amiga OS 2 had this thing called "amigaguide" which was a form of hypertext document reader, and at my mother's university early versions of Mosaic (which was bought and became Explorer) appeared

in actual fact, the real real original birthplace of hypertext was the Plan 9 Acme editor, which started blurring the line between text editor, command shell and document reader... in Acme you could type in a command, highlight it, and middle click, i think it was, and then under this text would appear the output of the shell command invocation

and i'm pretty sure that the ideas of Acme still haven't fully percolated into UI design YET... and the main inventor of Acme was Rob Pike, one of the coauthors of Golang 
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

he also at the time invented a language called Newsqueak (a language for mice) which the concurrency elements, the channels and coroutines, almost exactly landed in Golang, and was the main author of Acme and though it was 1992 before it hit official release, if you read up on it, it was definitely already being prototyped before HTML appeared (which is a derivative of SGML, which is also the root of Postscript, and goes back to the late 70s)

the real root, i would say, though, is not relaly Pike but Wurth, who invented Oberon, which is an integrated GUI and programming language that used modules (like Go packages) and a paning window environment... it was similar in some ways to Smalltalk, which led to Windows and MacOS, but different in that it was focused on programming and scripting

back in those days, i dreamed of running a full Oberon 2 environment, but sadly all i ever got was to read about it in obscure computer magazines 
 There are two types of people in this world:

Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets

https://image.nostr.build/0506e4bd31b61b608172d71bab3ac1a5d621a46fb137a11d274d71f52c077b04.jpg 
 Build, observe, fix, repeate 🤙 
 2 decades to go from the Internet to the Web.
2 decades to go from the web to smartphones.

#Bitcoin may not have a killer app before the end of this decade, and #nostr may not have a killer app until the 2040s!

nostr:nevent1qqsprfr9rjxj30q58762efrqs6s7f36v08vdh6dcljwvja8k6dmmlfgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsygqh88vn0hyvp3ehp238tpvn3sgeufwyrakygxjaxnrd8pgruvfkaupsgqqqqqqstypf0c 
 🫂🫂