Top all-time · #10106
John McCrea
Personal blog · therealmccrea.comhistoryweb
John McCrea writes The Real McCrea, a personal blog at therealmccrea.com about history and web. Since 2008, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-05-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this blog for posts on early web identity work such as OpenID, OAuth and Open Social, and for a series on SGI's WebForce, a 1990s content-creation suite that included VRML tools.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
John McCrea on the exponential wiring up of humanity
What Hacker News says?
I'm sad RackSpace chose to market this effort under the term "Open Stack". A number of us in the open web community have used that term to a great extent to talk about OpenID + OAuth + Portable Contacts + Open Social ( http://therealmccrea.com/2008/09/19/joseph-smarr-at-web-20-o... ) Admittedly the initiative has lost momentum (for many reasons and factors) but things are still out there. This just creates confusion…
Comment linking /2008/09/19/joseph-smarr-at-web-20-on-the-new-open-stack/
on “Openstack: Open source cloud computing software”Submitted Minh Nguyen: The Co-founder Who Wasn't as a story · 3 points
HN discussionfirst saw this in the 90s on an sgi indy. here's fun blog piece about the launch of sgi's webforce content creation suite which included tools for vrml. https://therealmccrea.com/tag/vrml/
Comment linking /tag/vrml/
on “VRML”Submitted Live Blogging the OpenID Design Summit as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGoogle are just testing an approach called "federated login" which they think is the usability solution to the so called "URL problem" which is that Joe Average doesn't know what a URL is or how it should be formatted let alone what his or her URL is. Obviously MySpace users do, but there is also an implication from Google that all users are comfortable using an email address. Many of the younger demographic use FB…
Comment linking /2008/10/20/live-blogging-the-openidoauth-ux-summit/
on “Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID”Submitted The Untold (and Rather Improbable) Story Behind the First Real HTML Editor as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is totally untrue. I sat in a room with every one of the major players last week. There is discussion and there is a sense that everyone wants to be in the same place. We haven't reached the exact solution right now but believe me we are talking. Look at http://therealmccrea.com/2008/10/20/live-blogging-the-openid... While Google are launching what they have that doesn't mean everyone doesn't want to move to th…
Comment linking /2008/10/20/live-blogging-the-openidoauth-ux-summit/
on “The Single Sign-On War Will Ruin OpenID”Submitted The launch of the first product line for web authoring and serving as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere is the semi-interesting story of the creation of webforce by the dude who came up with the concept. [0] This[1] is a picture of a WebForce Indy unboxed, complete with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indyballs. And this[2] is a brochure for the WebForce Indy. [0] https://therealmccrea.com/2014/01/09/january-1994-a-very-goo... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/6oohy7... [2] http://www.1000bit.…
Comment linking /2014/01/09/january-1994-a-very-good-month/
on “Can SGI’s Enthusiast Community Bring IRIX Back to Life?”Submitted The launch of the first product line for web authoring and serving as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere's a good series of articles on WebForce by the person at SGI who had the idea. Starts here: https://therealmccrea.com/2014/01/09/january-1994-a-very-goo...
Comment linking /2014/01/09/january-1994-a-very-good-month/
on “Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail”