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The Tenth Birthday Of The World Wide Web
UoHCIC writes: "Excerpt from at A Little History of the World Wide Web
"
17 May (1991) Presentation to "C5" Committee. General release of WWW on central CERN machines."
This indicates that the Web was released to the world at large on May 17, 1991." Talk about fast moving: 10 years old, and just look at all the pr0n you can snarf. Imagine where we'll be at 20!
In any case, Glad Syttendemai til internet venner vaaren i Norge!
For more information on Norway's constitution day, please visit here (in English): 17.mai
I think it's only a matter of time till /. opens popups to poopsex.com when you try and close your browser...
They call me Moe
Enjoy it!
Markus
Computers were certainly interconnected more than a decade ago. I courted my first wife via DARPA and she's been gone for more than a decade.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
its ten years old, and yet no one has discovered a viable bussiness model for the internet based company.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
If everyone can make any links he wants, doesn't the whole thing become a hopeless mess?
yes :)
1996, you say? Interesting. The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 paid for increasing network backbone infrastructure over the next 5 years. Perhaps there's a connection? However, I seem to remember some guy getting a whole lot of shit for taking credit.
TCP/IP. HTTP. graphical web browsers. What do these things have in common? Answer: they were all created with government funding.
CERN Committee: Eh? OK Tim, um, sounds great...
Inevitable, obvious, but still a little bit sad. Can anyone remember how many logins there were for www at info.cern.ch (i seem to recall it was about 20)?
I've still got a printout somewhere, about 10 pages of 6-point print but it was, at the time (late 1993) "the complete list of world-wide-web servers".
All .edu, .gov, .mil, .net or countrycodes (mainly .ac.*). Still no such thing as .com.
Just unthinkable only 8 years later.
Progress, eh?
TomV
let's have a 10 popup window salute!
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Er, wait. Make that every six months their number doubled. That way we end up with more than 2 million from an original 10 [estimates].
That way, after another 10 years, the web will be choking under the weight of 6.871947e+11 porn sites, many times more than the projected population of the Earth.
[Something to think about.]
Talk about fast moving: 10 years old, and just look at all the pr0n you can snarf. Imagine where we'll be at 20!
umm...if i remember correctly, porn was a LOT easier to grab when the net was only 6-7 years old....before the Cyber Decency Act kicked in...
> Before the web came along, the internet was the home
> of intelligent discussion, and academic research. It
> was a wonderful means of communication.
Two things: first, the intelligent folk still gather on the Internet, and second, it's still a wonderful means of communication. I'm a member of a Moot that's entirely email-based, and I therefore have opportunities to discuss topics I'd never otherwise know with very smart people I'd never otherwise meet. I can converse for free with my friends who live hundreds of miles from me, and my father and I often share online games.
> Suddenly the WWW appeared. This ended this golden era.
"Golden era"?!? I think I'd have to argue with you there. I ran a BBS for many years, and I thoroughly enjoyed the sense of community that it engendered, but I don't look back on my BBS days with longing to return to the "golden age". Perhaps you're glossing over the fact that there was so much less available on the pre-1991 Internet, or perhaps you have no need for, and therefore no appreciation of, what out there now.
> Everyone wanted the internet. The media got a hold on the idea
> and it has never been possible to explain to them the difference
> between the web and the internet since. No more research is interesting
> to anyone unless its web based. This network has been reduced to
> another tool for the corporations to force their content onto us.
It's okay that everyone wants the Internet, it's not their fault that the mainstream media confuses WWW and the Internet, and since non-WWW research is (I'm guessing) interesting to you, and it's certainly of interest to me, you can't very well make statements that nobody cares about anything but the Web. And also, you're assuming a lot to say the the only use of the WWW is as a corporate propaganda tool. There's a lot out there that isn't corporate, and saying that the influx of advertising and other content by business has spoiled the Web is very much like saying that roads serve no use other than as a repository for billboards.
> The last hope for a free populace was eliminated, because
> the sheeple just wanted another form of passive entertainment.
Ah, here's the rub. "How dare those sheeple demand that the Internet give them anything other than what I deem appropriate" is your message. How very elitist of you. How odd that your statement so closely reflects the lamentation of the Women's Temperance League about how bawdy stories and romance novels had ruined libraries as a repository of higher knowledge and drawn the unwashed masses into their doors. You are right to assume that some people want the Web to be just another form of passive entertainment. You are wrong, however, to assume that all users that use and enjoy the Web are sheeple that don't know any better than to be led around by their credit cards.
I've been working with (and on) the Internet since my school days almost twenty years ago, and I don't seem to recall any "golden age" back then. It was usually a big pain in the ass, mostly because of "more learned than you" types like yourself. Get over it, and try the Web for real. You might enjoy what you find.
Virg
At this landmark occasion in the web's history we can look back and see just how much things have changed, and for the better, in the last ten years.
To start with, the web was an academic project to allow scientists to communicate more easily without the limitations of email. Since then it has grown massively, shedding the ivory tower textual paradigm to become the most popular part of the net by far, and the driving force behind the massive growth in the amount of people who have net access, a thing which we all agree is good.
Nowadays the web is a reflection of modern life rather than a bastion for the priviliged few. Anyone can grab an AOL CD and get online, put their web page up and chat to people across the world, and without services like AOL we would still be stuck in the situation we had in 93, where there was a marked lack of content and none of the features we take for granted nowadays. Heck, even the IMG tag wasn't in the initial design, which says something about what they intended the web for!
I'm hoping that the continuing growth in ordinary, real people coming online will further fuel the technological advances that have made the web such an interesting place today, and that cheaper and faster access will mean another explosion in useful content for us all.
Um, we still have that knowledge gap. The vast majority of people who use AOL work on faith and believe in magic... they don't know much about what's going on inside their machines.
More elitism. Why should everyone have to know how their computers work? The fact that people encounter difficulties through not having such knowledge is a flaw in computer systems, not the people using them. Technology after all, should be our tool rather than our master, which is why Windows is still far better on the desktop than Linux.
10 years, and only 1% of all users have found out how to do something proper with it.
What do you define as proper?
Frankly, I'd be more disturbed by the fact that indoor plumbing as been around for hundreds (thousands, really) of years, but millions of people (if not billions of people) still don't have that simple "luxury." Or that we've been able to control the flow of electricty for centuries, but billions of people still don't seen to have that simple luxury, either. Maybe we should worry about getting people up to the basics before we start worrying about the fact that so few people have found a proper use of the world wide web.
Dinivin
... what the oldest page on the web is?
That is, the page that has been available on the web continuously and without change for the longest time.
Alternatively - what is the oldest server on the internet? That is - the server that has been continuously connected to the internet (preferably at the same IP) for the longest time.
Suggestions anyone?
10 years, and only 1% of all users have found out how to do something proper with it.