CERN Celebrates 20 Years of an Open Web (and Rebuilds 1st Web Page)

An anonymous reader writes "Twenty years ago CERN published a statement that made the World Wide Web ('W3,' or simply 'the web') technology available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish." Reader Rambo Tribble adds that CERN "is recreating the very first web page to ever exist. Included in the effort are plans to use the original hardware, as well as software, that gave birth to our beloved WWW."

Comments

I wonder whether Lamar Smith

[Black Parrot]

Would have approved.

Re:I wonder whether Lamar Smith

[Antipater]

Who gives a fuck what some luser thinks?

I do, and you should too.

Re:I wonder whether Lamar Smith

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

He'd probably be conflicted. This 'WWW' stuff is a bunch of pointy-headed eurocommie academic bullshit designed for distributing things like scientific papers and porn; but the network it runs on top of is good, solid, ARPA-designed, National Defense research designed to keep the communications up even when Ivan drops the bomb.

Re:I wonder whether Lamar Smith

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not. The world-wide web has no obvious defense application, it isn't an obvious benefit to the welfare of the public, and it merely duplicates the work of people like Ted Nelson in the 1960s, or industry-funded efforts like Apple's Hypercard. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars. Grant denied.

Re:I wonder whether Lamar Smith

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It was funny to read when it came out. It's even funny when clicking on the button on the site and seeing it. It's NOT funny when someone links to it from a one-sentence post and thinks they're so fucking clever to have discovered xkcd.

It's completely appropriate, seeing as the person in question is a religious wacko heading the United States House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Among other things, he thinks that medicine is evil and faith is a panacea.

Re:I wonder whether Lamar Smith

[kermidge]

Nice one, fuzzy. Thanks for the best chuckle of the day.

And this page will be

[ganjadude]

slashdotted in a matter of seconds

plans to use the original hardware, as well as software,

Re:And this page will be

[Anonymous Coward]

slashdotted in a matter of seconds

plans to use the original hardware, as well as software,

Hacked in 3 2 1 ....

Re:And this page will be

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Are there actually any exploits available for NEXTstep on 68030?

I don't doubt that vulnerabilities exist; but that's a platform that, er, makes Amiga look like a contender...

Re:And this page will be

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you are right that there were vulnerabilities. I remember that one of the more fun ones was based on filesystem operators that existed in Display Postscript used for the Window Server. They were fully enabled by default in earlier versions of NextStep. This allowed you to do cool things like opening files on a remote computer by sending a malicious Postscript file, which was happily interpreted and displayed by the receiving machine's Mail.app program (both a cool feature and, in this case, a tragic mistake). It was good for a few harmless pranks between workstations on a LAN. After this "feature" became widely known, it became routine to redefine a "secure" context within any program by nulling out the Postscript operators that could be used for such purposes, and in later versions this state became the default mode of operation. I'm sure there are plenty of other things left, though.

Despite such mistakes, with its UNIX underpinnings NextStep was reasonably secure for its day (it was no Solaris, but compared to Windows...). As you imply, part of that was being a rare enough system for it to have been targeted in the first place. However, it is a bit much to imply that it isn't a significant contender in any sense, given that OS X is effectively a later version of NextStep. It's gotten more malware attention as its popularity has increased over the years.

Next Project

[hduff]

The first porn site restored . . .

Surely, this is archived somewhere.

Re:Next Project

[DougOtto]

It just wasn't the same on an amber monitor.

Re:Next Project

[tgd]

The first porn site restored . . .

Surely, this is archived somewhere.

The first porn site would far pre-date this -- there were plenty of "story" porn sites running on Gopher servers, FTP sites, BBS sites running via telnet, newsgroups.

The Internet was full of porn for a very long time before HTTP came around.

Re:Next Project

[ikaruga]

According to wikipedia:

One of the early Gopher/FTP sites was at tudelft and was called the Digital Archive on the 17th Floor (List of websites founded before 1995). This small image archive contained some low quality scanned pornographic images that were initially available to anyone anonymously, but the site soon became restricted to Netherlands only access.

Unfortunately the link is dead. And even searching for the archive using archive.org database, the earliest I could find was December 2, 1998. The porn was already deleted.
If anyone saved that picture archive, please notice that what you have is data is a landmark in human history(Just like that Playboy picture used in computer graphics). Quoting Dr. Jones: This archive belongs in a museum!

Al Gore....

[bobbied]

Worked at CERN?

I never would have guessed that.

Re:Al Gore....

[Brucelet]

This is the World Wide Web. Gore's "invention" was the internet.

Hosted on a NeXT computer?

[ArcadeMan]

In a way, we can say that Steve Jobs invented the Web!

Take THAT, Al Gore!

P.S.: I don't know anyone named Tim Berners-Lee.

Re:Hosted on a NeXT computer?

[WillAdams]

It's well worth reading his book:

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/

I hope they have better luck w/ their NeXT Cube than I have w/ mine --- still haven't found the time to work out why it quit booting.... though I may have to put some effort into that if I don't find a better alternative to Macromedia FreeHand than going back to Altsys Virtuoso.

Should they be thanked for this?

[whizbang77045]

Should we thank them, or go looking for some tar and feathers?

Re:Should they be thanked for this?

[interkin3tic]

If it seems at all likely cause a revival of pointless frames, unnecessary GIFs (expanded to fully utilize broadband connections) flashing text, and MIDI music, then I say we should burn them at the stake right now.

Re:Should they be thanked for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should we thank them, or go looking for some tar and feathers?

I don't recognize this feathers command.

Re:Should they be thanked for this?

[SleazyRidr]

But, it must have been the first website for the guy who made it.

Re:Should they be thanked for this?

[mu51c10rd]

You need to install it first...

Re:Should they be thanked for this?

[robsku]

I know that the genius idea on Unix is to have a large number of small applications that do one job and do it well - so unlike with zip/arj/rar we get to choose our archiving and compressing software independently of each others, or even combine them with something totally different for reason that the authors of these programs couldn't even have thought when they made the tools, but still... ...why would anyone combine tar with feather(s?)? :P

Experience of the first ever webpage

[sl4shd0rk]

"Wow!! Those blink tags are going to be so useful!"

Re:Experience of the first ever webpage

[SuricouRaven]

Followed by "If only there were a way to add musical accompaniment."

Re:Experience of the first ever webpage

[Sooner Boomer]

...And dancing hamsters.

Re:Experience of the first ever webpage

[EricWright]

Sometimes I miss dancing hamsters.

But then I sober up.

Re:Experience of the first ever webpage

[SuricouRaven]

If you miss dancing hamsters, you need to improve your aim.

Re:Experience of the first ever webpage

[Brucelet]

You can still find them if you dig hard enough. "Unfortunately" the music doesn't work in my browser but you can always click the link at the bottom for a sample.

Re:Experience of the first ever webpage

[robsku]

I feel so guilty and ashamed of my past right now... But then again, in the mid-90's, which DooM related website didn't have the game music as .mid - accompanied by animated doom guy or imp.

Re:Experience of the first ever webpage

[SuricouRaven]

Can they do that? The music was actually from a Disney film, but sped up.

Problem loading page...

[naturaverl]

The server at info.cern.ch is taking too long to respond. ----- The internet is millions of times larger now than it was back then & I'm thinking that hosting it on the original hardware was a mistake... If they really still want to use the old hardware, couldn't they at least put a fast proxy server in front of that old 68030?

Re:Problem loading page...

[gewalker]

Well, I can't get to it myself either, but I am pretty sure it just returns "Hello, World."

Re:Problem loading page...

[gewalker]

After a number of attempts, I was able to get the home page, it looks like this (links are dummied)

World Wide Web

The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists , Policy , November's W3 news , Frequently Asked Questions.

What's out there?
Pointers to the world's online information, subjects, W3 servers, etc.

Help
on the browser you are using

Software Products
A list of W3 project components and their current state. (e.g. Line Mode ,X11 Viola , NeXTStep , Servers , Tools , Mail robot , Library )

TechnicalBibliography
Paper documentation on W3 and references.

People
A list of some people involved in the project.

History
A summary of the history of the project.

How can I help ?
If you would like to support the web..

Getting code
Getting the code by anonymous FTP , etc.

Journalists

[onyxruby]

How long until ignorant journalists start claiming the Internet is 20 years old today?

Re:Journalists

[DavidRawling]

As I post this, minus 4.5 hours. The local (AEST) 6am broadcast was heralding 20 years of the Internet (then clarifying to be the Web, which everyone knows is the same thing ). But I was thinking - I'm sure I was seeing http URLs (not that we as students necessarily recognised them as much as we do now) in early 1993, and they weren't for CERN but for an early online, full-colour comic whose name escapes me.

Any bets...

[DaveAtFraud]

Any bets that it will get slashdotted when it goes live? This assumes CERN will make it accessible to the 'net in general.

Cheers,
Dave

Direct link to the site

[tocsy]

Here: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Re:Arg

[Microlith]

He isn't credited with creating the internet. He's credited with creating the WWW.

We've successfully slashdotted the first web page.

[wiredog]

Damn timey-wimey stuff.

That's awesome

[mpdolan37]

They need to time the response time to mimic what it would over a 2800 baud modem too!

Re: That's awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

2800 baud? Non-standard speed.
You must mean 2400 baud or 28.8Kb.

Re:Arg

[Murdoch5]

Fair enough I shouldn't call them the same thing, but still I don't the credit should go to him alone.

Misleading summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Included in the effort are plans to use the original hardware, as well as software, that gave birth to our beloved WWW.

Well, yes, they are preserving the hardware, the software, and the content. But they are doing all three separately; the box has been repaired, the HD has been imaged onto a CD, and the pages have been archived and are being re-hosted at the original URL.

They are not going to use the original NeXT box to host those pages.

I'd credit Marc Andreesen too

[peter303]

The web didnt really take off in the USA until he developed two decent browswers- Mosaic and Netscape. I used Mosaic in 1993.

Re:timothy, QUIT IT, YOU FLAMING MORON

[K. S. Kyosuke]

QUIT USING PARENTHESES EVERYWHERE. Did you fourth grade teacher instruct you on ANYTHING? ... From where did you graduate? Bovine University?

He probably graduated from MIT, the AI Lab.

Not in that much a hurry for my Pr0n

[Trax3001BBS]

When I saw the first browser online, I can't remember it's name but the description
mentioned seeing a pictures from a distant location. I just assumed it was a new
terminal program and didn't need to save the few seconds viewing downloaded pix.
The fact there were only one or two places it worked on; a struggling terminal program.

Needless to say I passed on it, running my first browser a year later on Win95.

Re:Not in that much a hurry for my Pr0n

[TapeCutter]

Probably Netscape, I was at uni when HTTP was invented. Most people, including the lecturer's were not interested, at best people thought it might somehow be useful for professional publishers, none of us had any inkling of how fast it would grow and spread. I think the reason for this is that geeks already knew how to move files around and they saw it as just one of many ways to move and display files, obviously they could only do it with a special file in an unfamiliar format (HTTP). The basic reaction from most technical people at the time was a shrug, to them the basic idea was "obvious", its future central role in the communications revolution of the 1990's was not.

Re:Not in that much a hurry for my Pr0n

[robsku]

I think the first browser I saw was Mosaic in library - I didn't know anything about web except that there was supposed to be hypertext links and images mixed in text on webpages. I didn't know where to go - but there was a huge address book, an "internet phonebook" if you will with subject categories.

I don't think the librarian knew what the book was about or about the computer and software either. There was only standard installation of Windows 3.? with only the Mosaic, if I remember correctly, to use for accessing the web. I was baffled because none of the addresses in the book worked so I got nowhere and nothing out of it - later when I became just slightly aware of this stuff (back then I didn't yet even have a modem to access BBS systems) I've learned that the book was basically a printed list of *usenet* groups, not web pages :)

Re:Arg

[DNS-and-BIND]

Strangely, that wasn't the impression I got from that Dan Brown novel. The one where they take the rocket plane to Europe. The reader is informed that the Americans did shit, it was CERN that invented the internet as we know it, in other words the web.

Re:I'd credit Marc Andreesen [and Eric Bina] too

[c0d3g33k]

There, fixed that subject line for you.

Learn your history. Eric Bina [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Bina] co-authored Mosaic along with Mr. Andreesen, and I'll bet there were other team members at the NCSA who made non-trivial contributions to the project. At Netscape I doubt he did any development at all. Marc's fame came from being a well-known dot-com businessman, not for single-handedly developing the graphical web browser.

I, for one, welcome our ancient overlords.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

First web page?

No disclaimer!

No privacy statement!

Probably no multiple languages, violating some European law.

I can't believe people survived without the wisdom of our masters!

Re:Big Deal

[TapeCutter]

I'm sorry, but there is nothing special about HTTP.

I was at uni studying CS when HTTP was invented, that's exactly what I thought, boy was I wrong!
I also shrugged at Java - "1970's pcode in a new dress, so what".

Re:I miss the old WWW

[robsku]

It may sound funny, but I really do miss the simpler days of the WWW. Yes, I know... horrible tables, banner texts, under construction signs, and the dreaded blink tag. I miss Geocities. I miss personal "home pages". I miss Web rings.

Strange that it is I know what you mean and share, up to some amount, the same feelings.

You know what I also miss? BBS systems, actually dialing up them (not the newfangled telnet connection which was just a useless layer to slow down the communication which wasn't exactly fast to begin with), playing Lord on them, sharing pirated applications via zmodem protocol, and most of all I miss Fidonet. But these things don't really compare to what you said because they actually weren't crap, they were awesome - and I don't miss shitty BBS's, only the good ones :)

Nowdays nobody buys landline phones in Finland anymore - would it be, in theory, possible to use cell phone + PC to run a BBS? :D