World Wide Web (1991)

https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

by geuis • 2 years ago

279 125 2 years ago

info.cern.ch

votiv• 2 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_bef...

CPLX• 2 years ago

Haven’t thought about IUMA in awhile. That might have been the first site I went down the rabbit hole with.

jaza• 2 years ago

I remember the first time I ever saw the WWW, I think it was 1996, I was in 5th grade (in Australia). The whole class sat down cross-legged in the "computer room", where the school's brand-new Internet connection had just been installed (was probably a single 14.4k modem). The teacher opened Netscape Navigator (on an Apple Macintosh) and clicked on a bookmark. We all sat there spellbound, waiting patiently. About half an hour later, the front page of nasa.gov had finished loading! We all thought it was amazing.

qingcharles• 2 years ago

In 1993 I remember most of the web sites being "How to write HTML."

I see one guy there with photo.net -- and you might wonder why he didn't register photo.com. In '93 basically every domain was available, for free (there were no fees yet). Dotnet domains were definitely seen as nerdier and more exotic and rarer beasts than their dotcom brothers and the value of a domain was little understood.

sourcecodeplz• 2 years ago

Kind of awesome that some of the websites from W3 Servers (https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html) are still online, just a couple though.

geuis2• 2 years ago

I also love that the original servers were written in a few lines of C. We've come so far since then, in plus and minus ways.

anthk3• 2 years ago

I've seen web servers written in Maclisp (almost close to Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp) under ITS and PDP 10's.

http://up.dfupdate.se/httpd%20html

datascienced• 2 years ago

First there was W3 then Web 2.0 then web3.

pasc1878• 2 years ago

I have found 3 with useful pages but half a dozen which just give a blank page. And a few which are a copy of the 1992 web.

justsomehnguy• 2 years ago

Wow, such a marvel of engineering, which is absolutely readable both on my 4k landscape monitor and my portrait smartphone!

Does anybody knows, what CSS and JS magic did the guy used here?

ainiriand• 2 years ago

Sarcasm will not be tolerated.

AlecSchueler• 2 years ago

Without joking, it's the only page I've opened in a long long time that was readable on mobile without lots of pinching and scrolling.

MrDresden• 2 years ago

HN is pretty usuable, except maybe for some of the small touch surfaces.

Brajeshwar• 2 years ago

Every webpages starts out responsive and adaptive by default. :-)

niemenmaa• 2 years ago

Kinda reminds me of this saga (lots of foul language ahead)

- http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

- http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

- https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/

fragmede• 2 years ago

You joke, but the first web page came out in 1991. CSS wouldn't come out into 1996, and JavaScript was 1995.

Closi• 2 years ago

That was the joke, don’t worry we get it ;)

zilti• 2 years ago

Technically, there was DSSSL already though. It is missed dearly.

RGamma• 2 years ago

They use the very efficient noop framework. Go check it out here:

throw310822• 2 years ago

Did someone already make a monument of these words? They would look great carved in stone, with markup and everything:

  <BODY>
  <H1>World Wide Web</H1>The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area<A
  NAME=0 HREF="WhatIs.html">
  hypermedia</A> information retrieval
  initiative aiming to give universal
  access to a large universe of documents.<P>
  Everything there is online about
  W3 is linked directly or indirectly
  to this document, including...

tambourine_man3• 2 years ago

I wonder about that name attribute. Was it a tabindex equivalent?

guessmyname• 2 years ago

The name attribute is used to create a named anchor. [1]

When using named anchors you can create links to a specific section on a page, instead of letting your viewer scroll around to find what he/she is looking for. Named anchors are called bookmarks in Expression Web.

NOTE: Not supported in HTML5. Use the global id attribute instead. Specifies the name of an anchor

You can also use the name attribute on the server side to identify the fields in form submits. [2][3]

[1] https://www.expression-web-tutorials.com/anchor-tags.html

[2] https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_name.asp

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1397613

mopsi• 2 years ago

And even there we can see copyright issues:

  Information by Subject
    Music
      Song lyrics (apparently disabled for copyright reasons)

https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overvie...

tempodox• 2 years ago

I still remember how lyrics.wikia.com had to shut down because of copyright issues. It was a site where users could edit and publish song lyrics.

wanderingstan• 2 years ago

And I’m still mourning the loss of the Online Guitar Archives (OLGA); I still have printouts of all the songs I attempted to learn on guitar.

zarazas• 2 years ago

Did you post this because of Kneipenquiz from Rocket Beans? :D

geuis2• 2 years ago

Nope. Was looking at some old abandonware games from when I was a kid and that got me thinking about the first time I got online on the actual web, not aol or whatever we had back then. Then I remembered that the original site used to be still running and checked if it was active.

CynicusRex• 2 years ago

The first website is still more user-friendly, faster, and prettier than most of the Web today.

“Web4 should run on LaTeX. The World Wide Web is broken: it is dominated by a handful of websites, nearly everything is financed by ads, bloated tech needlessly slows down surfing, NFTs and blockchain are digital cancer, et cetera. Stop it. Just stop it.” —https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/web4.html

POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (https://indieweb.org/POSSE)

anthk3• 2 years ago

Just use Gemini, or Gopher. Gopher can be read with POSIX netcat+echo+less or gawk. Gemini, with Gawk and OpenSSL:

http://git.vgx.fr/gem.awk/

On chess, telnet/netcat to freechess.org 5000. Use awk+nc or gawk to change the replace the chess pieces into UTF8 if you care.

No JS, No ads, no nothing. A 486 can still play networked chess, lurk at HN or Reddit via gopher://hngopher.com and gopher://gopherddit.com, read news via gopher://magical.fish (and even translate things from English to French or Spanish) play Nethack/Slashem, emulate the GB, play MP2 and MOD files, use IRC, use chat services against bitlbee.org with an IRC client, telnet to SDF and do crazy things with Emacs (from reading novels to comment on Mastodon/IRC and even play IF with Malyon), also, coding in Elisp.

Also, when the Gopher->Gemini bridge gets ready, you will be able to browse UTF8 Gemini and web sites wth just Lynx and a dumb 386 with a relative modernish GNU/Linux, such as a minimal install of Delicate Linux. Add gemini://gemi.dev on top of that and even modern web will be at least article-(text) readable, such as Ars Technica, Wired and The Register. And the bandwidth usage will be good for any user, too. No more data caps with tethered connections, gopher/gemini can be ridiculously small on bw.

With gemini://gemi.dev I could read news far away from a city, near train tunnels. The size of a web page was reduced from near a MB to few KBs.

GoofballJones• 2 years ago

I remember when this first dropped and I was like "this will never catch on. The Internet is using telnet to log into different systems....and FTP...and Usenet...and gopher...and IRC. This World Wide Web is just a gimmick.

Hey, I never said I was a visionary.

gjvc• 2 years ago

erroneous leading space on the first link. splendid.

jak2k• 2 years ago

We should go back to the roots. The modern web is too bloated.

simonh• 2 years ago

I’m continually astounded by the incredible shoddiness and unfitness for purpose of so many commercial web sites. The more time goes on, you’d think figuring out how to make a functioning web site would become better known, but no. In many ways it gets worse.

gerdesj2• 2 years ago

Yes and no. A modern house is ridiculously bloated compared to what my ancestors lived in or even a tent but I wont give it up.

You only really need a kitchen and somewhere to take a dump (defecate), separate from the kitchen. The kitchen gets you warmth and shelter from most weather in temperate to arctic climes, shade in warmer climes. The bog need not be "inside" but should be separate for obvious sanitary reasons. Oh and you'll need clean water, something to eat and something to burn for cooking and heat.

Tesco and co (supermarkets) can bugger off for being too bloated. I'll be going in with a knife (veg and fruit), spear and bow and arrow (food that moves). Mind you the bow is a bit excessive unless the food that moves is dangerous at close quarters 8)

Having said that: FAANG n that really is bloat that could be excised with little of importance lost from the web sigh. How on earth have we found ourselves in a world where "going viral" is a stretch goal and an indicator of success? GOPHER and WAIS and USENET were good enough, back in the day. We still have email for some reason and I can still run my own, from home, but not everyone can.

In around 1994 I was asked by my boss to investigate this new web thing. I had a Windows 3.11 PC. I telnetted to my departmental VAX. From that I telnetted to the organization's X.25 PAD. From that I could get from JANET to some exotic American NIST related thing ... then I would hit a GOPHER menu (I think) and after a bit of jiggery pokery I hit the web.

I could not really tell the difference, as an end user, between WWW and GOPHER/WAIS. The hyperlinks were simply distributed (through the text) instead of a list of menus. Instead of a page of a menu of links you got text with links in it - all a bit chaotic. Basically, a tree becomes a web. I told the boss it looked a bit better than the menus of G/W but nothing really new. I think I even said to him that the status quo is organized like his hard disc and hence comprehensible but the web is a bit mad and freeform.

Do bear in mind that this is in a console, the browser was yet to become mainstream.

I'm not an important commentator on internets for obvious reasons! I completely missed the point that free form and a bit mad is exactly what was required for the web to go viral in no uncertain terms.

deepspace• 2 years ago

You only really need a kitchen and somewhere to take a dump (defecate), separate from the kitchen

Completely off-topic, but that reminds me of when I went hunting for my first apartment as a broke grad student. One of the places I viewed consisted of (only) a tiny living room and a tinier kitchen. The toilet was in the kitchen, sandwiched between the stove and sink. The only countertop area was a swing-up board above the toilet. Must have sucked if you had to take a dump in the middle of preparing dinner.

taulien• 2 years ago

This page [1] is still "Under Construction", I am wondering, when they will finish it :)

[1] https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Server.html

BrandoElFollito3• 2 years ago

I had the chance to work at CERN at that time (student, then PhD). I remember navigating on a demo site and being the visionary I am, I thought "ah, cool. Time for lunch".

I also mined some 100 bitcoins when they just appeared, out of curiosity. I forgot about the program running and came back to see these ~100 bitcoins. Being the visionary I am, I thought "ah, cool. Let's clean up and time for lunch".

Some people are doomed to be executors and only catch up.

Keyframe2• 2 years ago

any recent of dem visions?

webdevver• 2 years ago

just out of curiosity, what were you doing before you had lunch today?

elderlybanana• 2 years ago

Maybe reading about passkeys imminent death on HN?

linearrust2• 2 years ago

Given his trajectory, probably was busy in the lab and about to find the cure for cancer. Then lunch happened.

elwell• 2 years ago

GP was reading about my new LLM startup, remarked how it seemed 'cool' and then went off to lunch. BTW, did I mention I'm looking for investors?

badsectoracula• 2 years ago

That reminds me of my reaction when i first saw Minecraft back in the TIGSource forums: "this looks like a level editor i made a few years ago, it was fun to make levels with it but i doubt anyone is going to buy a level editor" :-P.

ramon156• 2 years ago

Wanna have lunch sometime?

ironmanszombie• 2 years ago

I, too, mined some bitcoins when it first appeared. My computer at the time was housed in a case of plywood that I'd made. I wonder if my crappy computer from over 20 years ago has at least a Bitcoin in it? Well, time for qat now. Will dig it out later.

hnfong• 2 years ago

1900s grandfather: I buried a sack of gold coins in my backyard.

2000s grandfather: The computer that I used to mine bitcoin is probably in the pile of junk inside the garage.

helpfulContrib2• 2 years ago

Its 1992. A friend of mine has asked me to meet with someone, to discuss the idea of 'selling things through the web'. I didn't like the idea - "this is not what the Internet is for... and the web is too esoteric, difficult to set up and use, TCP/IP WinSock blahblah", and I dismiss the thing entirely on an ideological basis. That friend goes on to participate in something that later became .. Amazon.

Its 1994. I turn on the modem back at an ISP I've just built, in a place called Los Feliz. After a few months of putting out the fires, I decide "this ISP thing is balls", and I leave. The guy I built the first data center for, goes on to be worth 300 million buckaroonies.

Its 1996. An associate has flown us to San Francisco for the day, to meet a guy who has been trying to get his auction site launched for the past year. We have lunch, we discuss the whole concept of 'online auctions', I dismiss it as being unviable "because latency" and legal jurisdiction. Okay, a few years later, I buy a synthesizer on EBay. I still have it, to remind me of myopia.

Its 1997. I get hired to make a bookmark-management site, called "Storease". I build it, but I don't like it. People will find things, then add their URL to our site, and collect "Storease". "This will be too expensive to scale properly unless someone comes up with data-centers as a commodity..." Something about this rubs me up the wrong way. Could've been delicious, though.

Its 2010. I buy a few bitcoins, for 30 cents each, and keep them around long enough to make .. 300 bucks. I'm proud of myself for selling 10 bitcoins and making 300 bucks.

This stuff happens. Its a difficult thing for technologically inclined ideologues to see the woods for the trees.

Its 2023. I am still ignoring crypto. All my friends are millionaires. I'm just glad to have a new version of JUCE to play with ...

imperialdrive• 2 years ago

Similar. Just along for the ride. It's still rewarding and can last a long time in good health. Hope you're enjoying it too!

YZF• 2 years ago

- I thought Google was too expensive at its IPO.

- "Cloud" seemed like marketing nonsense to me.

- I still think bitcoin is a scam.

On the plus side I did end up working for some tech companies that did very well. No complaints.

It's really hard (read as impossible) to predict the future. Efficient markets and all that. If it was clear that Google would go where it went then it'd be priced even higher. Even if you knew that "selling things online is the future" in 1992 it's not always clear how to act on that knowledge. You could have gone bust with pets.com or something.

Fast forward to today. What is today's Google? What is today's "cloud"? What is today's bitcoin? Someone is saying something about something, someone is right, many are wrong.

BrandoElFollito3• 2 years ago

Honestly, this is like I am reading my bio.

I had several of these along the way (including having a proposal to create a company but I was too busy courting a girl - they sold it for around 100M€ and split in in three :))

I work in high tech (bleeding edge) and spend my time automating my home and writing open source (when not working). My wife, from time to time, mentions how much I could do and my son cannot understand why I do not want to go further up the company pyramid. But I am happy, I have all the money I need and can now sit in front of my screen answering to HN while keeping an eye on the dinner I am cooking.

So yeah, lots of lost opportunities but the partying was wild :)

And yeah, I am still ignoring bitcoins when the guys in my team are making money (but live on an emotional rollercoaster :))

rqtwteye• 2 years ago

Oh my. Same here. I mined quite a few bitcoins on a friend’s PC a long time ago. Then we tried to do something with them but you couldn’t even buy a beer. So we forgot about the bitcoins and the disk is probably on a trash heap somewhere now.

hparadiz• 2 years ago

Time to get the IBN 5100 and go back in time.

lovegrenoble• 2 years ago

What a pity (

jbverschoor• 2 years ago

How about lunch sometimes?

Arisaka1• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the all-time classic (now) HN discussion on Dropbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 as I got older I realized that, you can never ever hope to choose what will be successful or important, and that is true down to the most seemingly small action you can make. The world is simply too complex and interdependent for that.

demondemidi2• 2 years ago

Sounds fake. This ain’t Reddit.

xcv123• 2 years ago

No. It was that easy to mine bitcoins back then and just throw them away. Interesting but worthless at the time.

BrandoElFollito3• 2 years ago

From your profile it looks like you are even older than me.

I find it strange that you did not go through similar stories - tech in the 90s was rather eventful. Maybe you were at the wrong place?

cubefox2• 2 years ago

My reaction when I first heard of the concept of a "wiki" where everyone is allowed to edit some post (curiously before I heard about Wikipedia): I thought such a system would immediately be ruined by vandalism. It didn't occur to me that there may be way more people who undo vandalism than there are vandals.

Or when I first heard about Twitter. My immediate reaction was: "I'm unusually open to wacky Web 2.0 ideas, but even I have to admit you can't say anything of substance in just 140 characters." And indeed, looking up some random tweets seemed to confirm this suspicion. Interestingly, this wasn't just my reaction. A lot of us "tech enthusiasts" had this opinion about Twitter.

cxr3• 2 years ago

My reaction when I first heard of the concept of a "wiki" where everyone is allowed to edit some post (curiously before I heard about Wikipedia): I thought such a system would immediately be ruined

There are people who think that today, despite well-known existence proofs we have to the contrary.

13of40• 2 years ago

Let me tell you about my grand scheme, circa 1991 or thereabouts, of downloading small images from BBSes and embedding them inline with the text.

defaultcompany• 2 years ago

Yeah I remember using NCSA mosaic to browse the early web and thinking “what’s the point of this we already have FTP and archie”.

gerdesj2• 2 years ago

I only mined around 1 BT when they were "worth" about £5 and then lost the wallet because I ran out of floppies for my transfer of data from old to new PC or I forgot about it (which is more likely).

I thought the www looked a bit mad and disorganized when I first telnetted to it via the US from UK.

Time for lunch.

MaintenanceMode2• 2 years ago

I too am similarly gifted. Back in the usenet days a group I was on received its first spam. There was some discussion about whether this type of thing would get out of control. I confidently proclaimed that there was no way spam would ever be more than a minor nuisance.

Keyframe2• 2 years ago

How's this different than gopher? At least gopher is well-established; This will never catch on.

chrisco255• 2 years ago

There's probably a Usenet thread with this exact text in some archive...

thomasahle• 2 years ago

Gopher also has a much more familiar UI with navigation menus. This "hyperlink" idea is typical ivory tower thinking. Nobody outside of academia will want to use this.

And support for images/multimedia? The internet bandwidth this requires will limit it to just a few elite institutions.

olddustytrail• 2 years ago

My exact feelings on seeing Cello browser.

Scarblac• 2 years ago

I remember finding the WWW in 1993 when it wasn't really more than about a thousand pages at CERN.

And I didn't see what was so special about it, and didn't do anything with it... I mean Gopher had archie so it was searchable. And I didn't care much about physics.

ricksunny2• 2 years ago

Does anyone know if TBL was inspired by Vannnevar Bush's Memex proposal at all?

Progressively through time we hear references to Memex as 'predicted computers', 'predicted search' 'predicted hypertext', "predicted AI",

to which I would add 'predicted tagging' and 'predicted recommendation engines'

[note the steady progression of our own technology through time reflected in the above list]

And there's still at least one more Memex prediction of something useful that I feel we still haven't produced yet.

edit (Ah I see that the wikipedia article for TBL mentions Memex front-and-center, so a pretty trivially identifiable association I guess.)

BirAdam• 2 years ago

According to his own words, he wasn’t aware of Bush, Engelbart, or Nelson when he started working on Enquire, but hypertext more generally was known to him. He became aware of those other men and their work over time and their ideas helped to refine his own.

ricksunny2• 2 years ago

Thanks for that!

Incidentally, Vannevar Bush's Oral History 14-part document https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/687 seems to have served as an early experiment in prototyping hypertext. It has lots of [X-Ref] items throughout that refer to other relevant parts of the (1000+ page) oral history. I'm not aware of that being a common documentation practice at the time, so I see it as an intentional prototype effort on his part.

lmihaig• 2 years ago

We should be forever grateful that places like CERN exist, which strive for open science and open source.

drycabinet• 2 years ago

Any examples other than Scientific Linux?

mihaaly• 2 years ago

It is so refreshing seeing content first simple pages from time to time in the cacophony of attention seeking (obstructively injecting themselves) pages with zero or negative (misinformation, misdirection, pure lies and harm) content. It is no fun using the World Wide Web anymore, it is a pure danger zone and struggle.

Except exceptions like this one here.

One of my sorrow how formally respectable mediums like BBC suck up to this crap trend. Their scrolling articles where your fingers get tired while the emptionally manipulative and exagerating nothing with active shiny presentation goes is something I ever finished, but once I tried. Rubbish! (and unluckily their content too in general, even for the simpler text articles, increasingly, all oppinion random quotes dipped in thick dripping emotional manipulation). Have to read The Economist instead. Not cheap but there the content matter still over the form.

RetroTechie• 2 years ago

Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of useful/interesting websites. Webrings, category-sorted directories with an entry 'portal' & similar.

These mostly disappeared as the web's content size exploded, maintaining those directories became too much work, and search engines were just so much easier / better to find what you're looking for.

These days: ad & tracking infested bloated trash everywhere, and search engine's usefulness have declined. Putting the few "small web" gems out there in a curated directory, might just be easier than trawling through heaps & heaps of junk (or in near-future: have AI assistant do that for you).

A kind of white-listing, if you will.

anthk3• 2 years ago

I remember a text mode BBC site a la https://lite.cnn.io and https://text.npr.org. Now it's not any more.

Gemini with gemini://gemi.dev/waffle.cgi opening the full BBC URL (with https:// on front) would be the closest to that.

Edit:

gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/links?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews

Try Lagrange in a PC or Android and open this URL.

chuckadams• 2 years ago

Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of useful/interesting websites.

HN and other link-aggregation forums are more or less a crowdsourced version of that.

niek_pas• 2 years ago

Look at how fucking fast this page loads. No newsletter banners. No ads. Easy to read, responsive. Why can't more of the web be like this.

potency• 2 years ago

Because expectations have increased since the early 90's and servers cost money.

adriangrigore2• 2 years ago

I also jokingly refer to https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ShellScript.html as the first version of my static site generator https://mkws.sh/

KingOfCoders2• 2 years ago

"If you know the perl language, then that is a powerful (if otherwise incomprehensible) language with which to hack together a server."

Perl was the first language I wrote dynamic websites in around ~1993 so this made me laugh.

adriangrigore2• 2 years ago

Things have sure gotten better now. :D

KingOfCoders2• 2 years ago

I found the syntax interesting

   /HEPDATA/REAC?P+PBAR  list of reactions involving p and pbar (?)

https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ServerWriter.htm...

tejohnso• 2 years ago

Interesting comments from the FAQ regarding resource discovery:

May...1992...

"By the way, it would be easy in principle for a third party to run over these [hyperlink] trees and make indexes of what they find. Its just that noone has done it as far as I know because there isn't yet an indexer which runs over the web directly."

...

"In the long term, when there is a really large mass of data out there, with deep interconnections, then there is some really exciting work to be done on automatic algorithms to make multi-level searches."

Altavista came out in 1995, Google Search 2 years later.

johnc_• 2 years ago

Will never take off.

marstall• 2 years ago

"there is no 'top' to the web" <= words that were mind blowing to me at the time

simonw• 2 years ago

It would be neat to catch up on what all of the people listed on https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/People.html have been doing for the last thirty years. I bet they are an interesting bunch!

tomxor• 2 years ago

I was hoping this was still being served on the same Next Cube with the "do not power down!!" label, but the HTTP headers strongly suggest not.

Maybe it's pointlessly romantic but I like the idea of machines and software continuing to perform their job well past their life expectancy. Voyager 1 has to be the most celebrated example. Maybe it's because it makes me care more about crafting things if they are a little less ephemeral than the modern software churn would make us believe.

lokimedes• 2 years ago

Last time (~2012) I saw that machine, it was exhibited at the CERN Computing Center lobby. Its sibling, Tim’s workstation was exhibited at CERN’s public museum. Both long disconnected.

twilightzone• 2 years ago

Even works in reader mode.

pbd• 2 years ago

wow. looks cool.

ape4• 2 years ago

No rush, but maybe somebody could fix this stray tag at the end

    <A NAME=49 HREF="...">anonymous FTP</A> , etc.</A>

dailykoder• 2 years ago

You can try the simple line mode browser by telnetting to info.cern.ch (no user or password. From UK JANET, use the Gateway).

doen't work for me :(

jpcfl• 2 years ago

Sad. Here's a simulator: http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

xeromal• 2 years ago

I just tried it too. lol

linearrust2• 2 years ago

No blinking neon text that could send a blind man into an uncontrolled violent seizure?

layer8• 2 years ago

From the news link, this is actually from November 1992.

flenserboy• 2 years ago

At the beginning of that Fall term one of my classmates pulled up next to me while I was working on a NeXT box in our lab. He had me pull up an app he'd had a hand in working on over his summer in Switzerland. "Check it out — this is going to be great. So much better than Gopher," he said. After following a few links I replied, "It's nice, but doesn't provide much more than Gopher right now." "No — but it will." It was fun to be able to see things in the earliest days of the web, & to see how it grew. Never would have guessed at the time that the browser would become the centerpiece of most people's computer use.

smm11• 2 years ago

I remember the first day we started Mosaic on a work computer, then looked around at Gopher pages.

peterbmarks• 2 years ago

I remember having an O'Reilly book titled "The Whole Internet". Hilarious concept. Gopher was pretty cool at the time.

mhandley• 2 years ago

I upgraded the UCL CS webserver to CERN/3.0 (the last CERN httpd release) running on a Sun Sparcstation 10 back in 1994, and it has been in production use ever since. The hardware got replaced at least once (our sysadmin has a large pile of spare mid-1990s Sparc hardware), and the NFS server storing the data has changed more than once, but it's the same software install still running on 1990s Sun hardware. It needed some minor patches for Y2K, but nothing in the 24 years since. Will be 30 years this summer. Needless to say as it predates SSL, it's no longer our primary server, but it does still serve everyone's home pages.

  % nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80
  HEAD /staff/M.Handley/ HTTP/1.0

  HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
  MIME-Version: 1.0
  Server: CERN/3.0
  Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 22:06:54 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Content-Length: 9973
  Last-Modified: Thu, 07 Dec 2023 13:26:26 GMT

MaintenanceMode2• 2 years ago

That's so amazing. That Sun sparc 10 was a beast of a machine. I had one running until 2020. It was seemingly unstoppable. It broke my heart to send it off to recycling, it's weird being emotional about a computer. It had been serving web pages (on-and-off) since 1997.

Aeroi• 2 years ago

A good reminder that the technologies that are most transformative in society often times start out appearing deeply complex with a poor UX for the average individual.

World Wide Web (1991)

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