Nerdsnipe time.
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@logvoid please read my original post.
@Edent Oh; I knew my reply was partially offtarget since it is not a narrative story, but does the memex fit the description: 'I don't mean some 1950's sci-fi with pan-Earth info system.'? If so, I missed that connection and should have not replied with the link I did. -
@relache
I think the 1984 Stephenson story was maybe not the first. I read an earlier booklast month that had computer viruses."*When HARLIE Was One* is also the novel that introduced the concept of the computer virus to popular thought. For that I am profoundly sorry."
From David Gerrold's intro to his 2014 rewrite of the HARLIE book. The 1972 version was definitely using virus to refer to computer code ruining and stealing data. I suspect there might be earlier references.
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@relache
I think the 1984 Stephenson story was maybe not the first. I read an earlier booklast month that had computer viruses."*When HARLIE Was One* is also the novel that introduced the concept of the computer virus to popular thought. For that I am profoundly sorry."
From David Gerrold's intro to his 2014 rewrite of the HARLIE book. The 1972 version was definitely using virus to refer to computer code ruining and stealing data. I suspect there might be earlier references.
@relache
I do wonder if Stephenson's *Snow Crash* might have managed to pull this off. It would be REALLY early for the web, though. Like, a bit pre-public-Mosaic, but maybe... I don't have a copy handy to look at.I fear that Microserfs might mention websites, too, but that's 1995 I think.
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@simoncox.com www was officially announced in 91. Though Snow Crash was probably inspired more by earlier Internet. Metaverse was definitely not www.
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@khleedril @Edent I used to use them to try to identify books people couldn't remember the names of, and they'd almost always give me results like: "[real book title] [fake description of its contents]"
@skysailor @khleedril @Edent And they're often confidently wrong. Try using them on areas where you have deep knowledge but phrasing questions like someone who doesn't.
They are satisficing machines (intended to give a satisfyingly plausible answer) not reference librarians who will give as accurate an answer as resources currently provide (and who will be honest about uncertainty). -
@Edent the first one I remember reading was the one about sysadmins after the end of the world by Corey Doctorow, but that can’t be the first.
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Nerdsnipe time.
What was the first work of fiction to feature the World Wide Web?
I don't mean some 1950's sci-fi with pan-Earth info system. I mean a story with a character literally visiting "www. something" on a computer.
Any ideas?
@Edent I'm interested in the answer to your question but want to call out the 1909(!!) EM Forster short story, The Machine Stops, as being shockingly prescient about a world wide information network and the impact it has on life.
A must read.
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Nerdsnipe time.
What was the first work of fiction to feature the World Wide Web?
I don't mean some 1950's sci-fi with pan-Earth info system. I mean a story with a character literally visiting "www. something" on a computer.
Any ideas?
@Edent this has a ton of good info but no clear answer to your specific question (sharing partly so I can go back and make a to read list!)
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@Edent I'm interested in the answer to your question but want to call out the 1909(!!) EM Forster short story, The Machine Stops, as being shockingly prescient about a world wide information network and the impact it has on life.
A must read.
@maj @Edent
on that level (1909 Machine) there is Shockwave Rider, 1975, which is close but too early.Surely Jerry Pournelle wrote at least a short story?
He had computers & wrote SF.
Also the Chaos Manor column in Byte,Hardly anyone had WWW at home before Jan 1994 and it started late 1992. Sure the Internet was running in 1980s, as it developed from Arpanet & bitnet.
So any 1st book with real WWW is likely 1992 to spring 1994.
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@Edent I hate myself for saying this as I abhor everything about LLMs, but this is exactly the sort of question they (or at least the infrastructure which supports them) would be good for. Except LLMs are not nerds...
@khleedril @Edent
No an LLM isn't good. The answer could be fictitious. Decent search is better, like DEC / Altavista invented. -
@maj @Edent
on that level (1909 Machine) there is Shockwave Rider, 1975, which is close but too early.Surely Jerry Pournelle wrote at least a short story?
He had computers & wrote SF.
Also the Chaos Manor column in Byte,Hardly anyone had WWW at home before Jan 1994 and it started late 1992. Sure the Internet was running in 1980s, as it developed from Arpanet & bitnet.
So any 1st book with real WWW is likely 1992 to spring 1994.
@raymaccarthy @Edent Yeah. Circa Jan-May 1994 I used a shared computer in the basement of UC Santa Barbara to try Mosaic for the first time.
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@raymaccarthy @Edent Yeah. Circa Jan-May 1994 I used a shared computer in the basement of UC Santa Barbara to try Mosaic for the first time.
@maj @Edent
NCSA Mosaic was only released in 1993.We had it in 1994 for IoL & I still have the two discs.
I & others wrote stories with some kind of Internet in the late 1980s. I even had tablets and hyper documents. See 1980s Apple Hypercard and FutureNet Schematic Capture which had hyperlinked files) inspired by Dynabook (1972) and Project Xanadu (1960).
Forget SF. A mundane book in mid 1990s. Maybe a detective story. Common by 1998's movie "You've Got Mail"
1972 Gutenberg
1996 Nokia Phone -
@maj @Edent
NCSA Mosaic was only released in 1993.We had it in 1994 for IoL & I still have the two discs.
I & others wrote stories with some kind of Internet in the late 1980s. I even had tablets and hyper documents. See 1980s Apple Hypercard and FutureNet Schematic Capture which had hyperlinked files) inspired by Dynabook (1972) and Project Xanadu (1960).
Forget SF. A mundane book in mid 1990s. Maybe a detective story. Common by 1998's movie "You've Got Mail"
1972 Gutenberg
1996 Nokia Phone@raymaccarthy @Edent I created a choose your own adventure game in Hypercard! It had a big map you unscrolled and everything! Good times.
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@maj @Edent
NCSA Mosaic was only released in 1993.We had it in 1994 for IoL & I still have the two discs.
I & others wrote stories with some kind of Internet in the late 1980s. I even had tablets and hyper documents. See 1980s Apple Hypercard and FutureNet Schematic Capture which had hyperlinked files) inspired by Dynabook (1972) and Project Xanadu (1960).
Forget SF. A mundane book in mid 1990s. Maybe a detective story. Common by 1998's movie "You've Got Mail"
1972 Gutenberg
1996 Nokia Phone@maj @Edent
Not a novel / story, but written about 1993-1994 about the real internet & real early web browsers OTHerwise and Viola.
https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TimBook-old/History.htmlOnly 500 www servers by end of 1993. 1994 was big year and home dialup with Mosiac. 10,000+ servers in 1994
Original Win95 was no more Internet ready out of the box than 1993 versions of Win3.x / WFW3.x.I'm confident fiction will be in a book published in 1995 & maybe started in 1994 on romance or detective theme.
Wire Romance in 19th C. -
@khleedril @Edent
No an LLM isn't good. The answer could be fictitious. Decent search is better, like DEC / Altavista invented.@raymaccarthy @Edent I'm aware of what rubbish they are capable of. But they have access to the biggest database and of all ways of finding the first web reference this (probably) has the best chance of success (I mean, today, not in 1980).
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Nerdsnipe time.
What was the first work of fiction to feature the World Wide Web?
I don't mean some 1950's sci-fi with pan-Earth info system. I mean a story with a character literally visiting "www. something" on a computer.
Any ideas?
@Edent No idea, but I remember them mentioning it in Buffy!
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@Edent I hate myself for saying this as I abhor everything about LLMs, but this is exactly the sort of question they (or at least the infrastructure which supports them) would be good for. Except LLMs are not nerds...
@khleedril @Edent For my sins I tried asking ChatGPT.
"There isn't a single universally agreed answer, because it depends on what you mean by "feature the World Wide Web."
If you mean **the actual World Wide Web created by** Tim Berners-Lee (which became publicly available in 1991), then the earliest known fiction that explicitly incorporates the Web appears to be from **1993–1994**, when the Web was still very new. Literary historians haven't identified one clear "first" work that everyone accepts. ([Wikipedia][1]) by William Gibson envisioned a vast interconnected digital information space and is frequently credited with popularizing concepts that resemble the modern Web and cyberspace. citeturn0search4
* by Vernor Vinge depicted immersive networked virtual worlds and online identities years before the Web. citeturn0search1
* described a globally accessible information network that many readers later compared to the Web. to works such as (1981) or Neuromancer (1984), depending on the criteria used. ([Goodreads][2])[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb?utm_source=chatgpt.com "WorldWideWeb"
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25410471-true-names-and-the-opening-of-the-cyberspace-frontier?utm_source=chatgpt.com "True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier by Vernor Vinge | Goodreads"Not convinced this is the thing that's going to cure cancer, guys...
