Larry Page: Google Was an Accident

Larry Page: Google Was an Accident

Posted by Hemos on Monday February 17, @11:43AM
from the the-best-laid-plans-of-mice-and-men dept.
DarklordJonnyDigital writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Google founder Larry Page has admitted that the Google project wasn't originally intended to be a search engine at all. "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations." ' Of course, happy accidents have often been the cause for advancement, technologically or otherwise.

 [Slashdot]

Some of his comments, especially about wanting to deal with annotations are especially enlightening in the face of the Blogger purchase.  Weblogs can and do, among other things, act as annotations to the web. 

12:41:19 PM    

The 25th Anniversary of the BBS

The 25th Anniversary of the BBS

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 16, @03:38PM
from the arbitrary-dates dept.
Jason Scott writes "25 years ago today, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess officially announced the creation of a little project they threw together with a 300 baud Hayes modem, a Z-80 based S-100 computer, and a phone line. They called it "Chicago Bulletin Board System" (CBBS) and it was the first dial-up BBS. From this beginning, BBSes grew into the many thousands and became an entire industry, and when the Internet started to mature with the World Wide Web, the users who had cut their teeth on BBSes moved over to it. So raise a toast to these two fellows for a quarter century of great online times."

[Slashdot]

It is interesting to note that many of the contributers to /. still refer to the discussions there as 'boards' a direct reference to the BBS'es of the past.

6:31:32 AM