First Website Ever?
The first website ever? No Flash, right?
Those were the days!
Boffinry nerve-centre CERN has attempted to recreate the very first website to mark 20 years since the official launch of the World Wide Web. It is feared the first ever web page is lost to the sands of time as it was changed daily and any backups are few and far between. However the team has pulled up a snapshot of the very …
wonder how long it took before porn made it to the web
Virtually no time at all ... by chance I found out about the web very early back in the days when NCSA still maintained a "what's new this month" page and one of the CS dept at Dutch Universities advertised that it had a site and either on the what's new page ... or more likely on their home page they proudly announced that they had the largest collection of porn on the web!
"The first website ever? No Flash, right?"
Flashing tags came along shortly after though. I think it was some mid 90s web designer unwritten rule that every bloody page had to have at least half a dozen of the damn things blinking away tring to get the user to have a seizure. Those were most definately NOT the days.
The internet was full of porn even then, you just had to download multiple files from newgroups and stitch them together
Plenty was available via FTP, too. And no doubt Gopher, and probably other Internet protocols. And gateways to BBSes, from which it could also be downloaded directly using XModem and its successors, Kermit, uucp, etc. Probably someone was serving porn via IND$FILE.
only photos though, no video.
Porn video was also available online pre-WWW (though perhaps not on Usenet binary groups, as even low-res compressed video would have been terribly large for many links of the day when uuencoded). Danged if I can remember a specific reference (it was something I was only tangentially aware of, when the occasional acquaintance felt the need to demonstrate some discovery), but I have a clear recollection of horrible, grainy, audio-free, VGA-resolution video (about as bad as VCD, but VCD apparently only appeared in 1993) of unattractive people engaged in what appeared to be stunningly unrewarding exertions, while employed at a location I left in late 1991.
The wayback machine contains content from late 1996:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961111191520/http://ncsa.org/
http://web.archive.org/web/19961114070121/http://www.rte.ie/
http://web.archive.org/web/19961115125255/http://www.cern.ch/
http://web.archive.org/web/19961218223009/http://www.nyt.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/19961221155400/http://www.latimes.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/19961221203254/http://www0.bbc.co.uk/
http://web.archive.org/web/19961223185720/http://www.times.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/19961222060658/http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://web.archive.org/web/19961224082642/http://www.irish-times.ie/
They're just some websites that I figured might be in the archive, listed in the order that they first appeared - I really didn't expect to see RTE pop up there so early, but maybe I shouldn't be that surprised - there was an underground "RTE to Everywhere" project distributing audio files of RTE news broadcasts on the web as early as March 1994!
Yes the wayback machine has a lot to answer for. In 1996 I was creating and selling web sites and wayback has copies of them. They were dreadful. I'm posting as anon so you can't find them and laugh at me.
The good news is that I was able to keep selling those customers upgrades for the following 17 years.
Oh good grief - I'll try to pitch this at a Sun reader level of comprehension,er, words:
Telnet lives on the Internet, the World Wide Web lives on the internet, eMail lives on the Internet, loads of stuff some good some bad live on the Internet.
This is about the birth of The World Wide Web which was most certainly only 20 years ago. The Internet which hosts it however is a bit older.
There is no sector of society that has not been transformed by the invention [...] of the web
He's never been to rural [a], has he? a = whichever region pleases you.
(P.S. First I wanted to write Ireland but figured that may leave dwellers of other rural areas feeling shrugged off. Yorkshire or Highlands spring to mind. Or, hell!, have you been to some rural, mountainous areas in Switzerland? And, for the sake of insulting although I've never been there: not to mention rural Mexico!)
...And saw firstly the cinematic show introducing the work that goes on at CERN and then the museum across the road. Strangely the 'world's first web server' appeared to be in both buildings under exactly that label - they'd sneakily put the actual NeXt cube on display in the cinema building and the rest of it (monitor/keyboard/mouse) was in a glass case in the museum!
I'll let them off though, I wouldn't have found the place without the Web
First saw the WWW on a rare chance of getting access to a VAXstation at Uni (normally being tied to the text terminals). Mosaic being the browser I think.
Wondered what the fuss was about. It just seemed to be like Gopher and WAIS, yet more dull academic documents but with pictures and colour.
Its big selling point at the time was Hypertext but I recall being unimpressed as that was a buzzword being thrown about everywhere and on the trusty old Archimedes I had at the time (plain offline documents that had hypertext in them, I forget the package that did it). Networking the content didn't seem interesting, again as I was just seeing it as dull academic stuff.
Wasn't until getting a 9600 modem and Internet access through Demon it started becoming interesting (noting the Uni blocked "The Internet" at the time! Students shouldn't be accessing the outside world after all).
I was accessing the internet via a VAX terminal as late as 1999 - my (boarding) high school wouldn't supply anything else for personal internet usage. (For schoolwork there were Windows boxes available.)
Was interesting navigating Geocities pages via Lynx text interface. Frames didn't work so well!
If they want to get the first ever web server back online via an emulator, they could help the Previous project:
http://previous.alternative-system.com/
It's a (so-far incomplete) NeXT workstation emulator. More info than the project itself gives out on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Previous_%28emulator%29
And I want it because I have an actual boxed copy of NeXTstep but nothing to run it on. Perhaps CERN can throw a coder or two at it for a while?
Good luck using that on Windows Vista and above. Microsoft in their wisdom removed it, apparently to reduce bloat (it's a couple of 100kB) and for security reasons (confusing a client with a server that was never enabled by default).
It's quicker to google PuTTY, download, install and run than it is to install the telnet client.
J.G.Harston, I'd point out to you that my reply was in response to "My Alter Ego" who said he needed to download putty on Vista. So holds no relevance to your situation.
If you can't add telnet to Windows then I doubt you can download and run executables either? Even if you could your firewall issue still stands.
Perhaps you could try this at home if it troubles you so greatly.
But, I'm just going to assume that, being the first webpage in the world, it didn't have those annoying <blink> tags, flashing smileys, generic ads (YOU *blink* ARE *blink* A *blink* WINNER *blink* !!!!!!), site hit counters, text marquees, animated gifs moving across the page, harsh text-to-background color interface, a link to a primitive java chat room that's the same as every other java chat room, iframes everywhere, a java chat room in an iframe, and loud MIDI music suddenly playing out of nowhere, for no reason whatsoever.
Bet it had porn, tho.
"How the Web was Born" by James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, both at CERN at the time and involved with Berners Lee. Covers all the little details, like how Cailliau had to hide Berners Lee's 20K salary from the physists who would otherwise complain about diverting funds from the real research. Heh.
http://tinyurl.com/ckbzf2h
..like how Cailliau had to hide Berners Lee's 20K salary from the physists who would otherwise complain about diverting funds from the real research.
Go to Oxford, find some of his 'colleagues' from those days lurking in the 'Royal Oak' (if that's still their favoured watering hole) wait for the moment they bring a pint to their lips, mention his name, watch the fun (and count the expletives).
And then there is the “Last Page of the Internet”: http://www.1112.net/lastpage.html
Which raises the interesting “thought experiment”:
What is the shortest path from the First Page of the Internet to the Last Page of the Internet, only by clicking and following hyperlinks?
(No cheating by getting to a search engine and typing in “last page” or some such.)
I wonder did they ever regret choosing those Ws, given that "double-U" is alone in the alphabet as requiring 3 syllables to pronounce the name of a single letter. Thus making the acronym WWW only three letters, but a hefty 9 syllables long... which is presumably why most folks seem to come out with something like "wu-wu-wu", when telling someone else a web address.
[interesting factoid: In Spanish W is called "ve doble" meaning "double-V". A more angular viewpoint on the letter-form]