Happy Birthday WWW

Written By: - Date published: 12:05 pm, August 7th, 2016 - 11 comments
Categories: uncategorized - Tags: , , ,

Posted on Slashdot today:

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Twenty-five years ago, the first public website went live. It was a helpful guide to this new thing called the World Wide Web. The minimalist design featured black text with blue links on a white background. It’s still online today if you’d like to click around and check out the frequently asked questions or geek out over the technical protocols.
Its original URL was info.cern.ch, where CERN is now also offering a line-mode browser simulator and more information about the birth of the web. CNN is also hosting screenshots of nine web “pioneers”, including the Darwin Awards site, the original Yahoo, and the San Francisco FogCam, which claims to be the oldest webcam still in operation.

What are some of the first web sites that you remember reading? (Any greybeards remember when the Internet Movie Database was just a Usenet newsgroup where readers collaborated on a giant home-made list of movie credits?)

I first started “browsing” (we didn’t “surf” back then) circa 1993 with an early version of Mosaic for Unix. I remember that first web page, and how at the time CERN was still maintaining an index of web pages, and highlighted new pages as they appeared. Thanks to the visionary Tim Berners Lee and team, the web is a triumph of the free / open / cooperative philosophy.

Despite being an early adopter I completely failed to spot the potential of the web. (Same with the first time I saw a WIMP computer, one of the first Macs in early 1985, I’m a terrible technology pundit!) What an amazing 25 years it has been. Just hope it doesn’t all go bad in the next 25.

11 comments on “Happy Birthday WWW ”

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  1. Draco T Bastard 1
    7 August 2016 at 12:59 pm

    I first started using the web in 1995 when I got my first IBM PC Compatible running Windows 95. Prior to then I had an Amiga and used that for browsing BBSs.

  2. ropata 2
    7 August 2016 at 1:36 pm

    I first started with email then discovered newsgroups. The www was pretty lame back then but the amount of content grew exponentially. Some of the sites I used to read (when i was a student in the bowels of the auckland uni science dept)

    worst of the web : http://www.worstoftheweb.com/classic/november1996.html
    wwwf grudge match : http://www.grudge-match.com/current.html
    alt.religion.kibology : http://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Kibology/top_ten.html
    kuro5hin.org (defunct but bits of the old community are here) : https://www.reddit.com/r/kuro5hit/

  3. lprent 3
    7 August 2016 at 1:55 pm

    I used to use usenet and gopher. The web was a hell of a lot easier, but really didn’t get a lot of content until early 95 after netscape got released. By then I was addicted to finding programming information from the web rather than the tedium of manuals, books, and poring over usenet feeds and finding gopher locations.

    🙂 remember this…

    • r0b 3.1
      7 August 2016 at 9:45 pm

      Huh – Yes I do. I stuck with Mosaic for a long time, but Netscape gradually won me over. And I’m mostly Firefox these days.

  4. weston 4
    7 August 2016 at 8:22 pm

    I used to play chess on something called …….fuck what was it ….forgotten .. anyway there were lots of different games and you could go into a private “room”I met many and various personalities including and this person i will never forget whose nic was Tie Me Up TIGHT .I fell in love with this person i loved her game she played like no one id ever played before and her style was as her name suggested she would simply stimie you over and over again not for her the horrid accumulation of “points “she saccrificed she blocked she parried in short she extended and teased … Until i understood the power of the bnd kick.. God i wanted her and we talked about her maybe cming to nz the weird thing was when i happened to mention that in the actual world i had received a visit from an old girlfriend it was all ova rova and in the virtual world she avoided me like the plauge If i live to be a hundred i doubt iil ever meet a better player.alas

  5. miravox 5
    7 August 2016 at 9:45 pm

    I was working on a university computer help desk back then. Interesting times as more and more students and lecturers discovered (aka experimented with the limits of) newsgroups, ftp and then Netscape on computers and networks that were so not designed for that. Staff were also learning on the job.

    I so enjoyed making up explanations on the spot and info sheets post-problems.

  6. ropata 6
    7 August 2016 at 10:39 pm

    Mediawatch on the impact of the Net on news.
    http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/201810677/skewing-our-news-and-screwing-the-business

    Guardian Editor Katharine Viner
    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truth

    When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and “facts” that are not. The [Brexit] campaign was well aware of this – and took full advantage, safe in the knowledge that the Advertising Standards Authority has no power to police political claims. A few days after the vote, Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his side knew all along that facts would not win the day. “It was taking an American-style media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

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