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

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

[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!

Re:I wonder whether Lamar Smith

[Antipater]

Who gives a fuck what some luser thinks?

I do, and you should too.

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.

Should they be thanked for this?

[whizbang77045]

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

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.

Experience of the first ever webpage

[sl4shd0rk]

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

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.

Journalists

[onyxruby]

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

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.

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.

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.

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'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!