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Web Turns Fifteen (again?)
Accommodate Students writes "The BBC is amongst those reporting that the World Wide web has turned fifteen. However, 6 August 1991 is not the only date claimed as the 'birthday of the internet'. So, is it time to fight this out to declare an official birthday? Or can the Web carry on like the Queen with (at least) two birthdays per year? The BBC also have a Flash Timeline of 15 years of the web."
If someone is claiming that, they're WAY off. Web != internet.
Wiki - "The first Web site built was at http://info.cern.ch/ [2] and was first put online on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could own a browser and how to set up a Web server. It was also the world's first Web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other Web sites apart from his own."a yer/index.php?id=9f72b0fbe5bde711a0696cac5b339a5e/
http://www.thesecondchancemovie.com/_site/mediapl
The BBC article is quite clear, August 6 was when the World Wide Web became possible due to the release of source code on Usenet. The summary indicates a poor understanding that WWW and Internet are not the same thing, whoever wrote the BBC article gets this, and has put together an interesting synopsis of events surrounding the birth of the web.
Without using the word "tubes".
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
No-no-no-no-no. Both of you are wrong.
Al Gore created (not invented) the Internet, not the Web. This is the birthday of the Web, which Tim Berners-Lee created.
(The actual Al Gore quote is something along the lines of "I took the initiative to create the Internet," nothing about inventing. Specifically.)
On a slightly serious note, this is the birthday of the Web: HTML delivered over HTTP, I'd assume. Not the Internet, which can be considered to have a birthday of anywhere between 1982 and 1989 depending on your definition.
But then again, so can the web. Looking over the W3C's timeline you can get several different "birthdays" for the WWW. Another good one might be March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first HTML/HTTP proposal.
The August 6th, 1991 date is the first date that an actual browser was made available to the public and could be thought of as the "birth date" as well.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Um... well, I guess we'll have to take their word for it! :)
I'm sure most /.ers are well aware of the page, but Google also lists other "famous firsts."
Dark Reflection
more specifically, Al Gore qualified that later as voting on legislation to create DARPAnet, an ancestor of the Internet, not the Internet itself. DARPAnet evolved into ARPAnet and eventually into the Internet.
Anyhow, nothing he ever said could ever make up for the idiotic things the elder Bush's VP said http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dan_Quayle/ - even in context he sounded like an idiot, although a few of them I think he meant figuratively (like being a part of Europe).
And no, I'm not a Democrat troll, I haven't been happy with any President for either major party(including Reagan, whom I think was a great figurehead, but made some lousy decisions) - most of the candidates for major parties I like are nixed early on because they stray on some issues from party lines.
> However, 6 August 1991 is not the only date claimed as the 'birthday of the internet'.
. html
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This claim is very wrong. The Internet (notice the capitalization) was born on October 29, 1969 at 10:30 p.m. See http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/LK/Inet/1stmesg.html
As for the World Wide Web, here's a brief timeline.
1989 March
"Information Management: A Proposal" written by the great Tim Berners-Lee and circulated for comments at CERN.
http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
1990 September
Tim Berners-Lee begins work on a global hypertext system.
1990 October
Tim Berners-Lee starts writing a hypertext browser/editor for the NeXTStep operating system. He calls it "WorldWideWeb".
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb
Here are some screenshots of his browser. Although simple by today's standards, the browser is rendering what clearly would be recognized as a web page today.
http://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/tims_editor
1991 March
Line mode browser (www) released to limited audience on "priam" vax, rs6000, sun4. This browser was a text-based browser, a major step backwards from "WorldWideWeb" that was meant to be so simple that any computer or terminal could run it.
1992 April-May
Other GUI web browsers are released for X-Windows.
1993 February
NCSA release first alpha version of Marc Andreessen's "Mosaic for X". Computing seminar at CERN. The University of Minnesota announced that they would begin to charge licensing fees for Gopher's use, which caused many volunteers and employees to stop using it and switch to WWW.
Well, there is no clear birthday for the WWW like there is for the Internet. However, the Web as we know it today would have been recognizable in April 1992. At that time there were about two dozen web servers world-wide.
That's because porn was almost never on FTP. Pre-WWW porn was found on USENET.