Taken from the NetTuts article by Glen Stansberry, the top ten in the following order...

1. Linus Torval creates Linux Kernel
2. The Mosaic browser launches
3. The W3C released the CSS level 1 recommendation
4. The Open Source movement officially starts
5. PHP is released by Rasmus Lerdorf
6. PayPal is founded
7. Firefox is released
8. Ruby on Rails goes mainstream
9. 37 Signals Release the Getting Real ebook
10. Amazon launches Cloud storage and serving

What do you think?

IMHO I think Ruby on Rails and the GR eBook could be better represented by the BaseCamp product. Personally I am not a huge fan but there is no arguing with the massive online business they have built for themselves via groundbreaking work, a fresh approach and inspired reimagining of what an online product is.

By merging those 2 into 1 point then there would surely be room for Google. Between its ground-breaking search engine, almost daily technology and product releases and mass contribution/consumption of everything else internet based surely it belongs in the top 10!

Maybe I am splitting hairs but would designating the W3C as a whole not be a fairer representation of its contribution rather than just the CSS recommendation...

The PayPal point is interesting but I think (and this is pretty out there for folks who weren't into it) the demise of the old Bulletin Board Systems of the 80's and early to mid 90's needs to be in there as the internet itself (or more so the World Wide Web) saw it's first major uptake outside of American university's by these boffins who turned their backs on their ANSI-based comms software that served between 1 and 50 phone lines to embrace the true distributed nature of the web.

I know when I was a kid and I realised that my 14.4k baud modem could be used to dial into Indigo (an Irish ISP - one of the pioneers on that island) to get onto the web instead of dialling up some guy's amiga running DLGpro in Sutton with two phone lines I was sold!

A lot of old sysop's went on to transfer their BBS content to the web and this encouraged people to follow.  I just think the whole BBS history and culture is slept on as it really was amazing what things like FidoNet were able to do before Tim Berners Lee put his mind to work on his Web idea....

My two cents anyway...

Last edited by CSS Lewis (2008 Nov 27th 6:20pm)

Perhaps following in the vein of your championing the pre-toys-r-us version of the internet, I came across this 17 People who changed the Internet article in which I learnt the name John Postel. I had never come across this guy before, doubtless there are more like him. But the fact remains, so many of the Facebook, Wordpress, Google, etc. darlings have so much to be thankfully for, like this Mr.Postel who did so much in laying the foundations, while they gather masses of venture and investment capital. I'm not bitter, just sad those before who did it as their passion never saw the reward. Makes me glad the Open Source movement is alive, makes me tired of the Marketing dept. that keeps putting those damn ads everywhere!

Postel's Law
Perhaps his most famous legacy is from RFC 793, which includes a Robustness Principle which is often quoted as "Postel's Law": "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" (often reworded as "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you receive").

taken from Wikipedia.com

Well, without a shadow of a doubt I have to say that on first look that seems like a very strange list to me, but I think top 10 lists are always going to be flawed. Whilst it does seem like the whole W3C standards process should be mentioned (I don't know where we'd really be without standardisation of HTML as well as CSS), I guess the push they're going for is the fact that CSS was so important as it separated style from content and made site development much much easier.

However some things strike me as being very absent.

MySQL anyone? Apache?

Points 8 and 9 seem flawed to me, but then I'm not a ruby coder, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing