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!

Comments

"10 years"? big deal!

[woggo]

187 years ago, "Norway" was invented. "Norway" is a virtual community where people can "treffe venner" (meet friends), "gaa paa kino" (watch cinema), even "spise reindyrsfilet" (eat reindeer). Unlike the web, which is organized by "links", Norway is organized by "roads" and "fjords". Instead of "clicking" on a "link", one can "drive" on a "road" to get to a new destination or take the "hurtigruta" to a different fjord. Like the web, however, Norway is somewhat balkanized -- there are over 37 dialects of its markup language, "Norwegian".

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

A backbone more than ten ago

[JJ]

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.

Re:using it for good, or just using it

[bachelor3]

One of the questions from the presentation:

If everyone can make any links he wants, doesn't the whole thing become a hopeless mess?

yes :)

Re:and yet dot coms fail

[Nonac]

The web was not designed as a business platform.

The web is an astounding success. It was designed to facilitate communication, and it has done that. Don't let the fact that a few mba types are upset that they can't make money off of it detract from its success.

When a company goes broke because its business plan is based on the notion that people will buy products because they are sold on the web, that is not a failing of the web; it is a failing of the business.

10th birthday nostalgia. Spiked

[TomV]

$ telnet info.cern.ch

SunOS 5.6

login: www
Password:
Login incorrect

OK, try a modern browser pointed at the same address...

Sorry, the hypertext and WWW information is no longer available on the info.cern.ch site. The physical machine no longer exists. Please refer to one of the new sites described below

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

to celebrate

[enrico_suave]

let's have a 10 popup window salute!

E.

Moore's Law of Porn

[tenzig_112]

As soon as the CERN machines began running rudamentary http daemons, porns sites began popping up. But every eighteen months their number doubled.

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.]

Let's hope it carries on getting better

[sharkticon]

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.

And again

[sharkticon]

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.

Does anyone know....

[actiondan]

... 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?

using it for good, or just using it

[rassie]

10 years, and only 1% of all users have found out how to do something proper with it.