I went to railsconf Europe this year (was in September).
And they had a Roy Fielding talking who is, and has been for some time, doing a lot of work in http protocols and such (he wrote his university dissertation on REST, and Rails is being continually improved to make use of the REST paradigm).
He told us the story of how he chose to do that dissertation:
He was looking for something to do, but couldn't decide. He'd heard about this world wide web thing, and had been browsing it to see what it was all about. So he goes and "browses the web", the ENTIRE WWW. Comes back an hour later, and notices there are two more
website hostings (there were like 60 or something at the time), and decides that it's probably going to be quite interesting, since it's growing so fast (that's over 3% growth in an hour - imagine if your savings did that!).
It still amazes me to think that when I was born, there was no internet, now concept of WWW, no HTTP. Whenever I want to find a new place to go out, or want to buy something, the first thing I do is look it up on the web, I honestly don't know how I did it before the web was popular.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pu...entations.html - that is a link to the presentations. The one I'm talking about was called The Rest of REST, by Roy T. Fielding. It's has some technical stuff, but the first bit has some interesting hisrtory along the lines of what I mentioned above. If you look at it, look at the third slide, which shows a graph of internet growth (number of
website hostings) up until Jun 95, and has an estimate of the number in sep this year. I can't remember exactly what he said, but I think it was along the lines of "If I wanted the graph to actually show all the way up to now, I need the projector screen to go about 20k up into space!".