Ask HN: What was the first URL you saw in the wild?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521082

by replicatorblog • 17 years ago

7 12 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

With the WWW recently celebrating it's 20th anniversary I was thinking back to the first time I saw a URL on a commercial, advertisement, etc. It was definitely a McDonald's TV commercial probably around 1996. Do you remember your first URL?

nreece• 17 years ago

The local ISP's website, and Altavista I guess.

kyro• 17 years ago

It was nickelodeon.com on a commercial at the age of 10 or so. And it was pretty damn amazing, strange, and breathtaking even, the first time I booted up AOL dial-up and loaded the page.

paraschopra• 17 years ago

Yahoo.com at a computer being displayed at a tradeshow. I was mesmerised at that point...

babyshake• 17 years ago

I don't really recall the first URL, but I have a very clear memory of the first time I saw broadband access. My dad's friend gave us a demo of how you could load yahoo.com in "only seconds" with his cable connection. Within a week, we had our subscription.

Shooter• 17 years ago

symbolics.com

gne19632• 17 years ago

www.cnn.com

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

gopher:some.obscure.university.address.edu. It was late 1993.

gne19632• 17 years ago

where did you see that in the wild?

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

I was basically a "problem child" in middle school - I kinda refused to do anything I didn't want to. So after I'd flunked the kitchen safety test in home ec for the 5th time (true/false test and I scored a zero for the last 3 times :-)), school administration basically said "There's this new thing called the 'Internet' that we just got access to. We've got a dialup modem in the computer lab; why don't you spend the 42 minutes there instead of wasting your time pissing off the home ec teacher?" and then handed me a bunch of things I might want to try typing in - mostly gopher links, though there was this new invention called the "World Wide Web" that they suggested I check out too. I thought it was horribly disorganized and spent most of my time with Gopher.

triplefox• 17 years ago

I vaguely remember using some university's gopher system at a demonstration Internet setup circa 1992-93. That would make me seven or eight years old.

The first url I actually remember would probably be liii.com:8000 as that was the host of a Merc MUD I played on(Barren Realms). I have some recollection of playing on it a few times before we got internet access at home. Now they're at http://www.barrenrealmsmud.com/ and I haven't visited in probably a decade now. Nice that they're still around.

The second early url I remember is crl.com, the dial-up ISP my dad signed up with. We had a shell account on a real Unix box, with a whopping 5mb storage, and we weren't allowed to run SLiRP/TIA so we couldn't emulate a SLIP/PPP connection and use graphical browsers(a sore spot as the Web got increasingly graphical). They moved to business-only services some years later (and we moved on to other ISPs) Now the domain appears to be taken by a drug company. I don't remember what crl stood for, even.

A third good one was ftp.wuarchive.wustl.edu. They had a pretty spiffy anonymous ftp in the early 90s. Apparently it is now "too expensive to push bits to the world."

My predominant memory of the internet before around 1996 was that the Web was only one of several viable systems: email, Usenet, telnet, and ftp were also used by my 8-to-10-year-old self. But as I got older, the Web rapidly took over everything. I was still using dial-up right up until 2003 when I went off to college. And then still used dial-up when home on breaks, until I got a laptop and stole the neighbor's wi-fi. It's funny to think of how much dial-up's user experience grew less tolerable over time.

thwarted• 17 years ago

It wasn't the first, but one I remember shown in the trailer for the movie The Craft (I have no idea what movie I actually went to the theater to see). It is memorable because someone yelled out in the theater "HOLD ON WHILE I GET A PEN TO WRITE THAT DOWN", and the theater broke out in laughter. Little did they know that this little WWW thing wasn't just a flash in the pan.

lionheart• 17 years ago

http://www.yahooligans.com I used to love that site when I was a kid.

Ask HN: What was the first URL you saw in the wild?

Related Stories