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World Wide Web Turns 20 Today
girlmad writes "On 6 August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, then a humble scientist at CERN, made the first page on the World Wide Web publicly available in a move that, unbeknown to him at the time, would change the world more quickly and profoundly than anything before or since." Wired also has a retrospective, noting that "[i]t can be hard now, even for many of us who regularly used the Internet before there was a World Wide Web, to remember that there was a time when the two terms weren’t considered nearly synonymous by the general public." For those who remember, what was your first experience with the Web per se? For me, it was in 1993 or early 1994, with an excited demonstration of Mosaic on Sun workstations in the Geology department at the University of Texas.
During fall of 1991 and 1992, the World Wide Web ended up as one of many protocols one used to find information. At the time, you had multiple protocols -- gopher, FTP, heck, even some places like wuarchive had public NFS mounts. For searches, you had archie and veronics (for the gopherspace).
The first time I used a Web browser was on a NeXT, and the first Web server I used was MacHTTPD on a cast off Performa.
I feel old now...
My first experience going online was Prodigy, and the first website I ever visited was www.discovery.com, circa 1996ish
Irony? Yea, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron!
my brother installed some stuff on 3.11 that had what I guess tcp/ip stack(slip probably) and a browser that worked with it, I don't remember it's name but it wasn't netscape for sure and it wasn't trumpet which did the tcp/ip, of that I'm fairly sure. the first real internet was on this one bbs that had early linux connected to internet available for members, later it turned into more of a smalltime isp, moved away from that to different provider for isdn access. why can't web pages be more like they were with around when netscape 2.0 got out? content was king once, not the layout.. also early on, why was everything available for linux so well? realplayers and all - it's like 1995 was the year of linux on desktop.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
My first experience with the Internet was when I brought home a computer and modem from work and opened an Internet access account with IBM (now part of AT&T's network) back in 1994. At the time I didn't know what a browser was, so no web at that point. At the time I was using OS/2 and had the Internet Access Kit installed, so I had some Internet-related applications to use. I spent a few weeks using Gopher reading various texts, but at the time local BBS's were far more developed and easier to use, plus included Fidonet which I downloaded "mail" from to read offline with my Bluewave reader. I cancelled that account. A couple of months went by and I learned about something called Netscape and an OS/2 specific browser from IBM called WebExplorer. I opened my account again with IBM, downloaded WebExplorer, and had a ball. As I recall I ran Netscape under WinOS/2 for a while until there was an OS/2 specific version, but mostly I used (and build pages for) WebExplorer.
really big in the local bbs's someone tipped us off that the public library had hooked up their card catalog bbs service to the internet and was offering web access though lynx ... it was fucking awesome
I certainly remember seeing NCSA Mosaic for the first time.
But I also remember downloading stuff from the usenet alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* newsgroups and needing to edit out the headers, cat them together, and then run the whole thing through uudecode. Good times -- that's partly how I learned vi. ;-)
Oh, and of course both UUCP bang path addressing as well as the funky ones we had on the VAXes at school to translate from DECNet or whatever it was ... IN% or something before what we'd recognize now as a proper email address.
ftp.sunsite,unc.edu ... the ftp repository at White Sands Missile Range
Oooh, and SLIP on a Linux box ... that was pretty awesome. There was a lot of "internet" stuff before most anybody knew about the "world wide web". I remember trying to explain it to people in the way back, and getting looked at like I'd gone off my rocker.
And I didn't even need pants. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
My first experience with the World Wide Web was similar to subby -- it was in the Sun lab at the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University. The browser was NCSA Mosaic, and the workstations were about half black & white and half color. The rise of the Web started minor fights for the color monitors! Back in these days, the Web was pre-Google (or should I say, "BG", as opposed to "AG" ;-) . . . the home page was set to the local ODUCS website, and from there you could go to the NCSA Mosaic "What's New on the WWW" page and find interesting stuff. Plus, there was also the horny geeks on the 17th floor (p0rn), somewhere in Belgium,. . . ;-) Then, along came the Cool Site of the Day, featuring a new site every day of the week, which was fun. Back in those days, things were so new I never expected that I'd watch most TV shows via the Internet or access the WWW on my iPhone,. . .
"...would change the world more quickly and profoundly than anything before or since."
While certainly revolutionary (quite literally in recent times), I would argue that the advent of man-made fire or the wheel would give it a run for its money. Those have also been somewhat useful.
Well someone has to post about it. For me it was AOL 2.5 on my 14.4 modem on windows 3.1. Screaming fast!
I fondly remember going to my 6th form library in 1997 to visit totalannihilation.com on Bondi Blue iMacs to download new units onto a floppy disk every week. I was savvy enough to understand that the floppy disk needed to be formatted for FAT32 and the Mac could read them but Windows being the ignorant computer citizen it was, couldn't read Mac formatted disks.
Jonathanjk.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The World Wide Web has been very, very good to me. Thank you, TBL.
In the mid 90s I visited SF for a holiday and bought a computer magazine, called www or something. When I got back I got hold of slip and lynx, shortly followed by Mosaic. Mosaic was a revelation and I immediately realised what this 'information superhighway' idea we were selling to our consultancy clients was going to be based on. Also, echo the above comments about usenet, alt.binaries.etc and uuencode. I also first came across some of the more distinctive Japanese cultural artefacts.
You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger...
I think you can infer the rest.
Don't we all remember banging away on our 300 baud modem thinking it was FAST.... Oh the memories.
Yes, I know this was some years later ...
Comic Book Guy:
"Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace: The Final Brassiere.Oh hurry up, I'm a busy man. Ugh, this high-speed modem is intolerably slow."
I think it must have been 1993; possibly 1994 - I was shown Mosaic by another student. I remember thinking it was like some kind of mix between Hypercard and gopher. I can't remember what the first site I visited was. I do remember that all web pages were grey and left-justified, though.
I like how fast his page loads. Must have done a lot of optimisation.
I'm not nearly as tech-old as you people, but I still remember the days before Google where someone would give you their h.t.t.p.colon.slash.slash website which you'd view on Netscape.
"If you haven't tried NCSA Mosaic to travel the Internet, then you are
missing the best way to experience the Internet...Its so good, I think
we should make a WWW server [here], and get a [256kbps] connection to
the Internet." -- Rick Richardson, 9 Aug 1993
Dialing into message boards and private networks that had internet access.
I tried AOL im sure but that could not have lasted more than a month or so.
Then I found Best and found a home.
Rick B.
In 93, when www first "arrived" with Mosaic, but one technical leader said: Yeah but we already have the "gopher" protocol. Why do we need this?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Years before http: there was gopher:. And gopher could "hyperlink" to other gopher sites, depending on the client you were using. HTML was really the innovation, not the world wide web. As I recall, the web was, for many years, just a novelty compared to the real content in FTP and Gopher.
I had a college classmate who had just returned from an internship in Switzerland: "Let me show you something I helped work on this summer..." We had been using Gopher, of course, and individual command-line networking tools (even on our NeXTStations), but this was something...different. When I mentioned that it was cool, but didn't offer much content, my classmate was quick to answer: "but think of what we can use it for!" I wasn't there for the birth, but I did see it smile for the first time...
brwski
"Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well''
I don't know where i would be without it.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
Microsoft must take a lot of the blame for the confusion in the public mind between "The Internet" and "The World Wide Web". By calling their web browser "Internet Explorer" they misled a lot of people right from the start. Yes, you can use it to access stuff other than web sites, but for most beginners, the fact that the tool was called Internet Explorer meant it was obvious that "The Internet" was the thing they were browsing.
I was a fresh-outta-college CS major working at the then-aerospace behemoth Hughes Aircraft Company. We had been connected to Usenet mail and newsgroups using the very highfalutin' and expensive Telebit Trailblazer modem, one of the first 9600 BPS modems to hit the market.
The first evidence I can find of my former self is at the Telecom Digest archives, on a thread about phone repair service in the September 9, 1991 digest. I'm quite certain I was active on that list prior to our office's conversion to Internet mail, but it was a very big deal at the time.
Dog is my co-pilot.
best XKCD ever!
Please, do tell, what exactly has changed?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I remember a buddy showing me "this cool yahoo thing" on Mosaic my senior year at GT. I think it was hosted out of a home directory rather than a proper URL.
Before that, we were lucky to have "fast" 9600 baud modems in the dorms. Get off of my lawn!
The news spread pretty quickly at my university in Chicago, where I was working in 91. Having used archie and gopher we immediately recognized the potential. Yeah, Cern's www line mode browser with its numbered link interface wasn't much. We knew that would change. What mattered was the protocol. For me UK's lynx provided the first fast curses interface. We started gathering and providing lots of academic info really quickly. Watching think tank and academic info growth explode exponentially was a great experience. Some early bookmarks: lanl, ncsa, ukansas, uminn, simtel, ibiblio. What struck me as goofy after 91 -- and this persisted for a few years even after Mosaic was released -- were the web sites that tried to replicate the feel of a gopher interface.
It was late 1992 or early 1993 at SJSU. I got a UNIX acct and tried gopher, veronica, and lynx for hours that first evening, a total quarter to three evening.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
... I saw the web for the first time at a public computer while researching our garden simulator. I was not impressed. Back then I had used Hypercard and Smalltalk, and it just seemed like we could do a whole lot better, and I had been thinkign about how to do that. I still feel that way a bit, alhough obviously the linking idea has worked well, HTML and http had broad powers in their simplicity, even with links not being first class objects and virtual machines not being standardized, and so on. So, first impressions can be misleading, although I still feel there are major missing pieces or standards. We need to push on to a social semantic desktop, IMHO, and I've tried some in that direction myself...
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
By the way, a little known fact -- the 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon, about a culturally sophisticated networked culture that "defeats" a huge military empire that comes to conquer it, inspired Ted Nelson to work on hypertext (I asked Ted Nelson about this directly when he gave a talk at at IBM Research, and he had forgotten the name of the story, but that's where the name came from), and then his work obviously was one of the inspirations of the web. The story is floating around on the web, like in Google Books:
http://www.google.com/#q=the+skills+of+xanadu
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I can definitely recall running NCSA Mosaic 2.0, but I'm a bit dim whether I cut my teeth on an earlier Mosaic. A year or two before this, I had managed to obtain internet access when I lived in Toronto in the first week available on a provider called io.org where I mostly used the shell account on a system called r-node. Wikipedia says Internex Online was the first consumer dial-up ISP in Canada. Lots of people I knew had access to the internet through university dial-up accounts, back when September came once a year.
r-node was hardly what you would call a reliable service. I learned basic shell survival skills and made heavy use of an archie server based at University of McGill and downloaded a lot of technical information over ftp, if my session would stay up long enough to succeed. I tried gopher, but decided it was a bit of a crock.
I was in Halifax the year Mosaic came out, dialing in through Chebucto Freenet. This was a great community service. Cheap and surprisingly reliable for the price. Lynx was the default browser and I was happy enough with this since I was mostly using a 486 laptop with a monochrome screen.
On the Mosaic internet, I remember grey screens with rainbow separator bars populated with animated men-at-work GIFs and link-farm homesteads as far as the eye could see. This appalling landscape was so obviously the future it was almost beneath comment. I vaguely recall that you could find content at universities, wired.com, and gaming companies (ID Software must have been a frequent destination). My technical interest at this time was finding a way to compile the HP Standard Template Library with the Watcom C/C++ compiler.
So far I'm treating Mosaic as gopher clubbed onto the ice floe with a giant clue stick. I recall reading the URL specification in detail, which far more than HTML seemed to be the magic sauce. Mosaic dazzled in potential more than it impressed on first unveiling.
The first time I regarded document mark-up in a different light was when Sun started to promote the Java language. I read about the stack coherency guarantee, which impressed me, then I read about floating point ... and I flipped the bozo-bit so hard it almost gave me a concussion. The idea that floating point math was required to give the same answer on every underlying implementation offended me to the darkest nub of Scientology-hatred. Later it played out that strict adherence on x86 reduced floating point performance by an order of magnitude, because the implementation had to suppress "double rounding" involving the floating point guard bits (64 bit mantissa for working results). Sun thought that arrogating an order-of-magnitude reduction in floating point performance on x86 was doing the world a favour. Their world, not mine.
In high school, my idea of excitement was to program my calculator during chemistry class, leaving just enough of my brain active to grasp the general principle, then to use the midterm to apply my gleanings to a problem set for the first time. I spent my homework hours devising algorithms or formulas for anything that caught my fancy, with scant connection to school work. There was a lot of muttering about "heuristics" in chemistry class, which was a red flag for me to tune out completely. It always turned out that there was a precise answer available if you had a bit more foundation in math.
To my shock and horror on one chemistry mid-term, I discovered that the equilibrium condition for solution concentration expands to a cubic polynomial. This didn't trouble me as such, but I knew that no-one else in the class scribbling beside me was solving cubic equations. Maybe I had my workings wrong. I reviewed this three times. No, my workings are absolutely solid: it's a cubic equation ten ways from zero. Well, I've got 25 minutes left in a 45 minute exam, I better solve me some cubics.
In turns out the heuristic I missed involved approximating the cubic with a quadratic at the loss of about 10%
"would change the world more quickly and profoundly than anything before or since"
Such hyperbole is laughable.
I suspect that the collision that created earth's moon had greater impact.
That was my comment on seeing a secretary at Goddard Space Flight Center had one of the first versions of Mosaic (Summer 93?). I was already good at finding stuff with gopher and archie; I didn't need yet another interface.
I will say, though, that by the spring of '94, I had changed my tune, and I told my wife that "in the future" you would see trucks and billboards with web addresses instead of 1-800 numbers. It is very possibly my only prescient statement regarding mass marketing, and I failed to act on it financially. So, I'm stuck with saying "I knew it would happen," having a witness who has, if anything, a reverse bias to telling people I'm right instead of being a rich dot.com'er/cybersquatter.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I remember it like I remember the other two events. It's odd, as I was pretty dismissive of it, but it was in the front office of Bldg 5 at GSFC, and a secretary was showing it to me (yes, at NASA, back then, even the secretaries were geek-cool).
All these threads bring back memories of that time (Trumpet Winsock, Gopher, etc...) which was just after I got out of college. Cool stuff, indeed.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Because I agree it would be so much better if the scientific calculation program I give you computes different results for you than it does for me.
Definitely better.
So much better than having to fix some broken implementations of a standard in the next rev.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Oh, yeah - I remember hearing him complain about the lousy click-through rate on his Google ads...
#DeleteChrome
Slashdot needs post editing
' Got a few words fer ye : 150 Baud modems, analog telephone lines, BBSs (with overnight email with "internet addresses"), AOL an "dem other guys" vs. the rest of the world (the rest of the world won), finger, archie, ftp, textmail, ascii-art, asc-ii star-trek "simulator", (borrowed) ibm accounts at the U. And manuals. Wonderful ... manuals (including D&D).
I'm waiting for more interplanetary internet. Eight or 32 minute ping delays. Overnight email. Just like de *good* old days. :)
I didn't discover the web until 94 but I have fond memories of going to yahoo and skiimming through all the new websites on the Internet each week.
When I look back at my predictions from those early years, I was right about predicting the emergence of services like ebay, wikipedia, online newspapers and how the web would eventually supplant tv as the number one medium for wasting time.
I imaged social networking would be a bit like slashdot but that everyone would have their own personal webservers and that discussions would unfold as flat files. I imagined there would be tools that aggregated all the homepage discussions of your friends into threads of a single feed of "what's new and hot" and that you wouldn't care so much about modding comments up or down because it was all happening within smaller communities and if you didn't like a thread, you'd just drop it from your feed.
I was mostly wrong about universities (I thought that they would eventually become completely redundant with the web but they actually seem to be enduring more intact and unchanged than any other part of society). I was also worried that the decline of mass media in favour of user-to-user communication and hiveminds would mean an explosion of new relgions and religious-type thinking, but even though hiveminds are a problem on the web, they aren't as much of a problem as I had expected.
I also expected that there would be a lot more sentimental/poetic websites - I imagined a web of maps of the world would emerge, marked up with layers of memories, comments about why people found certain locations, virtual graffiti or game-like systems using real maps. Sort of a google maps / geocaching mix
I was working at Motorola in the early 90's and we'd just completed evaluations and selection of the end-user development environment for our new data warehouse project. I really like a Mac-thing called Prograph (we were an all-Mac facility) but we settled on PowerBuilder which, even then, I knew was on its last legs. It was a the safe choice, which usually is not really a good choice. Lesson learned.
A friend who worked in another department grabbed me and showed me a web page he'd written that queried a SQL database halfway across the country and displayed the results in Mosaic on a Mac.
"Uh, yeah," I said, not really getting it. I, too, had played with HyperCard and this web-wide-web was still pretty rough. I was wrong but the upside was just too much for a sane person to believe so I forgive me.
Time to fire up my old NeXT workstation and see if I can find anything that still displays reasonably coherently in WorldWideWeb.app.
Around 1995 I logged on to AOL through a computer at my mom's office. There was a chat room and people were asking what the Internet was, and how you could access it. Eventually I learned, then there was college and pr0n, and now I buy stuff from Amazon without tax. Even in California. Also, no more trips to the library, and no more wondering how to make byesar. Thank you Sir Tim.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
Freshman year in college. Our dorm rooms were wired with 10Mb ethernet and pathworks.
We had accounts on a couple of VMS boxes that were exposed to internet using a couple of T1 lines.
Don't remember the first graphical browser I used.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
I had a Primenet account in Phoenix, AZ in 1993... I remember having to figure out winsock and trumpet and god only knows what else to get it to work... After running a BBS for a decade (my first modem was 300 baud in 1983) my original opinion of the web/internet was simply "meh". Now that everyone and their Mom is surfing, downloading, emailing, tweeting, etc. I've revised my opinion to "mostly meh."
First of all... Happy birthday, World Wide Web! (and no, it is neither a Rickroll nor a goatse.)
Now, my first memories of the Web was shortly after Prairienet in the Champaign-Urbana area went public through the library. That would be either 1993 or 1994. I first had to go to the library to connect because my computer at the time (Apple IIGS) had both a malfunctioning keyboard and monitor. Eventually it got fixed and I could then explore the deep dark depths of the Internet from the comfort of home. I checked out this app that Prairienet had called Lynx to browse the Web, but it felt too klunky for general information and file searches. Instead, I decided I preferred using Gopher with the Archie or Veronica search tools. So I didn't do much on the Web until a couple years later when I got my first DOS/WfW system.
My biggest use of the net at the time was MUDs, MUCKs, various USENet newsgroups, sponging smut off ftp sites, IRC, and email via PINE.
This space unintentionally left blank.
A group of us interested in computers went to the District office or whatever, where they had some computers connected to the web. (Mosaic was the browser of course) I didn't understand much at the time (didn't have a computer yet) but I asked a friend why the pages loaded slow (it was a 384k connection) My friend, used to 14.4 Dial up said "dude, you have no idea how fast this is". The next year when I finally got a computer, I realized how nice that 384k was. It would be 8 years before I used a connection that fast again.
We were doing a UNIX course at Liverpool University and during the module on using Gopher, Veronica and FTP to enhance our use of the internet, we were shown Mosaic running on one of the comp-labs higher-specced HP workstations (much faster than the ones we students played on). I don't recall which page we accessed, probably the Mosaic home page...... I do remember it was dog-slow.
Of more interest at that time was the MCC Linux distro that was running through the comp-sci department like wildfire. 5 boxes of HD floppies....
1991...Twenty years ago, and it seems like only yesterday.
Anyway, my first experience with the "web" came around March/April '93 when I fired up NCSA Mosaic .8 or .9 at my alma mater. I'd graduated a couple of years prior, was working for a company in the area, and decided to head back to turn a minor into a major.
That last point is important. You young pups may not realize it--with ubiquitous Internet access from almost any device, and the emphasis on developing and monetizing websites/apps--but back in those days, commercial activity on the Internet was a big "no-no", and in some cases illegal. Unless one was affiliated with an institution of higher learning, a scientific/reseach company, or a defense contractor, one wasn't getting on.
So, there were no broadband or ISP dial-up connections, and high-speed generally meant 56-256Kb/s. Heck, a lot of backbones were T-1s (or multiple bonded T-1's by '93).
So, after playing with Mosaic for a few days, the college network manager (who had been a year ahead of me) saw me messing around with it, and asked me what I thought. My reply: "Not bad. I really like the concept, and think it's going to work great for text. But these graphics...they're going to kill the backbone; it's unfeasible."
Strangely enough (or not), that race is still ongoing today.
I've got the May 1993 update. Barely fifty pages covers the actual Catalog section, and it was actually pretty damn comprehensive. Fifteen pages covers the new chapter on the new WWW.
Written by Ed Krol, for O'Reilly, just before O'Reilly standardized on the Zoo; this one has a woodblock of a cartographer.
And I was running Lynx on an Amiga. Forget the baud, but it was a step up from the 110/300 on the Apple ][. (A Hayes card? Think so.)
Y'know what's really changed? During the first decade we had a term, "Web Years", because every year so damn much happened that the growth was convulsive. Each year easily felt like four or five or more till around 2000.
Oh! And *Thank You* Tim. Most sincerely.
[Start with a 80x24 text-only 1200-baud CRT terminal.]
1. Got an account at the university: was able to email other folks at the same university.
2. Heard about Bitnet: you could email people at some different universities!
3. Heard about Internet: you could email people at many different universities!
[Upgrade to a 9600-baud CRT text terminal.]
4. Heard about FTP: you could get files from people at other universities.
5. Heard about newsgroups: you could socialize or ask questions with folks at universities.
6. Oh, btw, you can send email to those people on Compuserve, AOL, etc.
[upgrade to X11-based monochrome Sun workstation!]
7. Heard about Archie, a way to search FTP sites.
8. Heard about Gopher, a hyper-text program that runs across the Internet.
9. Oh, btw, there are a few big companies on the Internet now.
10. Now there's Veronica, a way to search Gopher sites.
11. Somebody wanted to unify FTP, Archie, Gopher, and such; they're calling it WWW.
[Oh, this WWW thing can show you images as well, so you'll want to use one of the rare, 8-bit color workstations.]
[All images are 8-bit only, though, since that's all the workstations support (except for those very rare 24-bit workstations).]
12. This WWW thing can be pretty cool now that more computer companies are on it.
13. Some people at computer conferences are starting to mention URLs.
14. Heard about AltaVista: a way to search the Internet.
15. Some non-computer companies are starting to get on the web.
[I can get a PC with a 24-bit VGA card & 13" color CRT.]
16. Yahoo search seems to work better than AltaVista.
17. Wow, the first mention of a URL outside of a computer-related context.
18. Google search seems to work better than Yahoo.
19. I can imagine a day where everyone will know about the WWW.
20. Wow, that day is here. How'd I get so old so fast?
[I can hook up an internet-browsing cell phone to display video on a 50" deep-color HDTV.]
The Puget Sound area amateur radio operators had a tcp/ip network using the 2-meter ham bands and I put my Zeneth Z-100 laptop on it. I remember camping on San Juan Island with a ham group in 1989 and demonstrating how I could telnet from our campground into the Z-100 using a little Radio Shack hand-held computer. I couldn't do much of anything useful but it was very impressive.
In about 1993 we had moved to a farm in central WA state and Internet access was available but was long distance until a Wenatchee ISP put in a set of modems at the community college in Moses Lake. These were 35 miles away but, more importantly, due to a recent change in long-distance charges made by Qwest it was a local call. I got a shell account at the Wenatchee ISP and could then use Lynx to surf the web. It was pretty cool.
At about the same time I found a utility (I can't recall the name) that let me use my shell account to get a true PPP connection from my home Windoes 3.11 desktop. I had to be careful though because the utility allegedly used up enough resources at the other end that the system admin would notice. I renamed the utility and got a copy of Mosaic for my Windoes 3.11 box and then ran the utility and connected up. I can still recall that my first web page was about Egyptology featuring the treasures from King Tutankhamen's tomb. It was astonishingly better than Lynx. LOL
About a week later my shell account was cancelled by the admins in Wenatchee. They had noticed that I was using more resources than usual and detected my ruse. It was about then that I bought into a partnership in Moses Lake that started up an ISP called atnet.net and since I was the main system admin no one could tell me what I could - or could not - do.
Good times. And it was also nice - as a Unix guy - to disprove Byte Magazine's cover story claiming that Unix was dead. I went on to own two more ISPs and they all used either Unix or Linux. And instead Byte Magazine became dead.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I was taught BASIC in graduate school in the mid seventies where we used the CDC used by Bill Gates as a teenager. It used punched cards and the "programmers" (who were just clerks) wore white lab coats as they took our cards from us. A day or so later we got our green bar paper back along with our card decks. People drew crazy designs on the end of the decks so they could find them more easily. It took three or four pages of green bar to provide the answer, which was normally something as complex as: 42. Several years later I managed to score an Apple ][ Minus (Integer BASIC) in '79 (?) and traded my $500 motorcycle for a second disk drive. I also threw in a CP/M card and taught myself dBase II. I wrote a program called "Readability" which measured the grade level of text material. It was sold by Micro Power & Light for about ten years and furnished me enough royalties to buy--more computers, mostly, without dipping into the family budget. Meanwhile I managed to get my work to authorize a PC, another Apple just like I had at home. It ran Visicalc, and a strange word processor called Zardax from Australia.
I bought an IBM PC as soon as they came out (LOVED the keyboard!), and translated Readability for the IBM and did an Accounts Payable program out of dBase III compiled with Quicksilver. FidoNet was fairly new so I managed to get online that way at first, though I was also on "The Source" which charged per minute at the time. All that was pre-Web, of course. We put up a web server on Linux (which fit on two floppies at the time) in the very early nineties and put up a gopher, Pine for email, and Lynx as a web browser. I remember Mosaic, but we also had some other early graphic browsers I simply don't remember. Things started moving pretty fast after that. We automated with a mini, then re-automated with an ethernet system. I would install a LAN, then go to Novell school the next month to see how to do it. One of my guys had a young kid, so we'd tie an ethernet cable to his foot and have him slither through the crawlspace. We promised him a Happy Meal if he got to the other side. You never really know an industrial building unless you've wired it. We put in the first Frame Relay system in the city and managed to snag eleven Class C networks of our very own. (It would not happen today.) Each branch had its own Class C even though it had five devices only. (Now they may be up to 30 or so if you count the copy machines.)
By the end I had about 500 machines, including about 50 servers on a very busy ten site WAN with fiber to the net. I thoroughly enjoyed my career, where it started and where I wound up even though I blundered through quite a bit of it. But I'm very grateful to be retired and not responsible for a network like that any longer.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
With Still 9.8% of users on IE6, the web will not be considered mature but rather an adult baby who needs to still take off his nappies and learn to walk properly. When everybody is using fully HTML5 compliant browsers (Chrome still is 120 points behind on the HTML5 test). then I will consider the web to have a proper anniversary.
... for inventing the internet. Shame on you all!
I first got on the Internet using an old 286 with a 2400 baud modem, using the freenet in Ottawa. For bonus geek points, at the time I was the head doorman at a bar called Zaphod Beeblebrox.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
I was 10 or so. Finding all the bbs's i could connect to. Using mad amounts of long distance, much to my mothers chagrin. On an IBM ps/2 with 30 meg of hard drive space.
So I am a younger whipper snapper who only got internet access in 1999. Grew up using IE5/ Windows 98 on a Pentium III 450 and quickly learned why Netscape failed including not letting me use as much CSS as IE on my fansites for Petz/Pokemon. Tried Opera back when it had ads, tried Mozilla when it was still Mozilla and not Firefox or even Phoenix. Got broadband via cable modem in 2002 and briefly became a Linux zealot until I got bored and went back to XP and know why Linux only has 0.5% market share. Bought Vista ultimate on the day it come out too so no more "free" software for me.
Hopefully by 2015 when XP is end of support hence no more IE6 and Chrome/Firefox have finished playing version number games we can have a good web browsing experience with full HTML5 and the web will be considered a mature technology just like last century matured cars by the 1920s.
We think of the WWW as being an OK thing these days, only because of years of hard-fought experience. Think of Geocities pages with wild-ass layouts. But back in the early days, imagine your bank, e-commerce sites, university sites, government sites, search engines, etc., all looked like they were put together by a child, and looked like Geocities.
HTML has no standard layout. It's completely random. Whatever the hell you want to do. Whatever technologies you want to throw in. It took two decades for everyone to figure out that a navigation column (NOT A FRAME, NOT A SITEMAP, NOT AN IMAGE MAP), and with minimal changes as you navigate, is universally the way to go. So many times it was a nightmare trying to navigate a site, and you may NEVER be able to figure out how to get back to where you were, because the navigation column keeps changing the available options with each click. It was insane, and really, still isn't great.
Still today, you have to LEARN every new website you visit, like a child. Is the nav bar something you have to click on, or will it pop-up more options when you hover over it? Are these top-level categories that will just take you to more navigation pages, or will they take you to a page on the subject with high-level information, or such?
And how many years have we been hearing about the semantic web, and more and more markup to fill-in the gaps? I've got news for you... Gopher was great. It was strict about the format and layout of the page. Each page like navigating a book, but more importantly, every page worked exactly the same way. Imagine if the entire internet looked like a nice clean Wikipedia page... Mostly body text, links which take you to a list of references at the bottom, etc. No random layout crap. No advanced parsing to figure it all out. No need to learn to navigate anew with each new site you visit.
Hell, look no further than slashdot. With each revision I just keep changing settings to give me as old an simple of a layout as I can get. Nested comments, threshold 3, no-nonsense. HTTP and HTML were an anti-feature... The freedom to add cruft, and turn a nice interactive book into an awful DVD Menu of a thing. Things are only slowly improving as web designers and users discover how awful all the flexibility is, and collectively move towards a standard layout, which unfortunately is poorly typed and implemented a hundred different ways.
If Gopher had simply been improved, and HTML had never been, we wouldn't have "simple" web pages, or "mobile" web pages, because the layout on a phone would be just as good as on a desktop. So very much was lost, and very little was gained.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
IMO this is the classic case of something getting so big that a superior system can never challenge it.
The web, to me, is a under-functional core with over-functional (read: insecure and often able to do things against the users' wishes) bolt-on additions (eg java), whose security holes are then repeatedly patched up with incomplete fixes. It's inefficient, kludgy, and very badly misused by web authors.
A few of the more annoying parts are:
Some time midway through its history, the idea that content should be adaptable by the user (as was a big initial selling point) got diminished, as you can't adapt scripts or flash. A good example (but only one of a million) is that scripted links usually can't be opened in new tabs.
The biggest problem (as I see it) is that web authors (for example, /.'s) that have sites perfectly capable of being transmitted in the cleaner, more efficient script-less "old" method choose to go with scripts "because they can", or because it sounds better to say (either to the users or to HQ) our site now has here. These scripts routinely perform erroneously on non-standard browser setups.
Compared to an optimal replacement for the web, information takes far, far too long to download, for a number of reasons:
1. Poor caching, especially of "advanced" content.
2. Various protocols and multiple servers meaning that content can't be sent as one big chunk and must instead require multiple establishments of communication channels).
3. Lack of compression of much content, such as text and many images.
IMO, the web is a good pet project suitable for hobbyists and enthusiasts. It's not good enough for prime-time - sad that it's used there.
You agree with me.
November 12, 1990
Probably early 1993. I know I had Archie clients on our first graphical VAXstations in 1992, and remember installing an early port of Mosaic. I attended the 3d WWW Conference in 1995, and had a paper at one of the first astronomy-on-the-web conferences the same year.
One of my first internet experiences was configuring uucp on a sun3 and connecting to a nearby university (go sooners!), then downloading emacs via ftp-by-mail and hand-piecing the myriad of parts together, manually stripping out headers and so forth. It was a several day process.
And of course I remember www-talk and NCSA Mosaic, as well as Viola and one other, the name of which escapes me at the moment.
AOL 2.5, on a 28.8kbps dial-up modem. It cost $3/hour to connect to the internet, and combine that with the MMOs of those days, I ran up some bills. And, of course I was addicted. I had learned so much and my literary capabilities skyrocketed. It's too bad that there are articles these days of youth becoming worse at English and submitting assignments with emoticons, "ROFLMAO", etc., my vocabulary grew, and in a positive way.
Well... sorta. A friend of mine had an acoustic coupling for his Atari. He demonstrated it by dialing various computers, one of which was (probably) a Sun Micro at NASA's JPL. I wanna say this was about 1987. I thought *that* was cool, but I didn't really grasp the big concept, unfortunately.
When 1994 came, I saw it again. Unfortunately I didn't have a computer, as I couldn't afford one (I was lucky if I could eat more than once a day, at the time), but I knew I had to participate. It took me until November 1997 to "get online" for the first time.
My life, health, and sanity has gone downhill since... :-/
One thing I will say though... It was a HUGE relief and a great turnaround in my life when I discovered IRC. Thousands of nerdy, socially awkward guys (and a few girls) who I could kind of 'feel at home' with. We talked about computers, we talked about electronics, we talked about cars and cooking and science to every depth I wanted to take it. I never really had that before. Labels (soc, jock, nerd, rockstar) are dumb, I know... But to spend 23 or so years of your life feeling completely alienated and entirely unlike anyone else you've ever met, but then suddenly discover that there's a whole world of people just like you, with the same interests, feelings, desires, faults and intentions...
It sure meant a lot. :'-)
do() || do_not();
Back in 1992 (when I was in highschool) I hung around with some older friends who brought me to the local uni computer club and showed me the world of MUDs, IRC and the alt.sex.* groups on usenet. A year later (final year of highschool) I interned at the uni (physics dept) but spent most of my time at the computer club (as an "employee" I was allowed to be a member) handling their backups and doing software maintenance (and spending a load of time on my favourite MUD).
Must have been around that time when a friend of mine showed me this application called "Mosaic" that I really didn't understand what it was used for. A couple of years later, basically when Netscape came out I made my first page.
Nowadays in my mid 30's I'm an IBM:er, handling banking software and computers are turning out to be more of a bore (except computer games).
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska
My first experience with the web was in 1994 at sherbrooke u, my mon was working there and she had access to a 486dx4 100 equipped with nsca mosaic and trumpet winsock.
My first search was on yahoo, I search for the Mona Lisa and I found tits. My mom was outraged but I was delighted. I then persuaded her to allow my to on the web and find the real Louvre picture. Next years, after 9 month of begging I received as a gift 60hr of INTERNET by month, my only restriction was no child porn and no bestiality, I never violated those sane restrictions and I regularly thanks my parents to have allowed my to come on the Internet at such a young age.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
"There's something devilishly simple about the web on a theoretical level: create a network of wires, put a terminal in every home and business, and share information on top of it."
Mmm, I'm pretty sure this is called "The Internet". Also I'm not sure how Napster and AudioGalaxy related to the Web, given they used proprietary protocols.
As the Wired article stats, the terms "Web" and "Internet" are now considered pretty much synonymous by the general public. And lazy journalists.
I started using lynx when the first messages about the Web and the coming Mozaic started appearing on various academic mailing lists. It seemed a good step up from gopher.
Proudly using the tubes since Amiga 500 times.
I was a software engineer at the US Department of Agriculture and was asked in 1993 or 1994 to check out Netcom IX (I think that was what they were called back then - they later became Earthlink) and their graphic browser and see what it offered. My verbal report the next day was that the Web was the future of the Internet and we needed to get going immediately. And we did get going a few years later. I remember in 1996 a student coming to a grad class at GMU a bit late because he had been entranced by HotJava. The well-known professor in that class declared that his job was over and that in short time education would be totally Web driven and that the Web would become a universal OS (this prof. is a systems guy BTW). In retrospect heady, if not necessarily accurate in terms of projection of future events, times.
Mosaic 1.0 for Mac. Still have the floppy, and the last time I checked is was still readable. That and a BBS in a basement at the University of Denver.
University of Wisconsin-Madison A professor mentioned something new called "hyperlinked" documents. An over-the-shoulder demonstration in the computer lab (I seem to recall on a Mac but not certain) was intriguing. The thought at the time, if I recall, was for powerful bibliographic and definitional documents for research purposes. Remember, this was only a simple text document (black and white display) with underlined text that could be "clicked on" to open a new, related document associated with the underlined term. That is, the example I saw would have been a sample article with, perhaps, a word or term underlined/linked. About three years later (c.1996), I ordered my first book from a strange, online bookstore named Amazon ....
(Then again, in 1993, that was in the age of using KERMIT to download email list-servs to read at home. Another time ....)
A friend of mine showed me Mosaic with a web page open. I took a look at it and said "That'll never catch on" and went back to typing into my FTP session. It was at the computer lab of Tomball community college in Tomball, TX. I was busy searching for Warez at the time if I recall correctly and couldn't be bothered.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.