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The World's First Web Site Celebrates 25 Years Online (info.cern.ch)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN:
Twenty-five years ago, the first public website went live. It was a helpful guide to this new thing called the World Wide Web. The minimalist design featured black text with blue links on a white background. It's still online today if you'd like to click around and check out the frequently asked questions or geek out over the technical protocols.
Its original URL was info.cern.ch, where CERN is now also offering a line-mode browser simulator and more information about the birth of the web. CNN is also hosting screenshots of nine web "pioneers", including the Darwin Awards site, the original Yahoo, and the San Francisco FogCam, which claims to be the oldest webcam still in operation.
What are some of the first web sites that you remember reading? (Any greybeards remember when the Internet Movie Database was just a Usenet newsgroup where readers collaborated on a giant home-made list of movie credits?)
Its original URL was info.cern.ch, where CERN is now also offering a line-mode browser simulator and more information about the birth of the web. CNN is also hosting screenshots of nine web "pioneers", including the Darwin Awards site, the original Yahoo, and the San Francisco FogCam, which claims to be the oldest webcam still in operation.
What are some of the first web sites that you remember reading? (Any greybeards remember when the Internet Movie Database was just a Usenet newsgroup where readers collaborated on a giant home-made list of movie credits?)
Well prepared, well prepared.
If that page was made today, it would be spread out over 5 pages, have 32 trackers and self playing ads with sound.
The BLINK tag.
It's really sad that the first website is much easier to read than those built using modern tools.
The first website that actually worked as intended? Slashdot.org
The first website that I actually visited frequently? Lycos (pre-google era)
Yahoo was always rubbish. It started out as terrible, and stayed terrible till they did the free email thing, and then everyone else brought out their own free email and thus nobody ever profited from free email. This is circa 1998 now.
At the end of the day, Google ultimately is what "changed everything" with a search engine that actually worked and wasn't cluttered with spam like every search engine otherwise.
Hamster Dance
The first really cool site that I remember was where a guy poured liquid oxygen onto his barbecue. You can still watch it at Archive.org...
There was a massive fireball -- and a huge rush of adrenaline. I was always kind of sad that they didn't find some way to keep the original web page on the internet forever...
Anyone remember that site. Nice and simple, with a spider motif.
Well, I ran one of the first UK ISPs, and here is our fossil 'start' page for users:
http://www.exnet.com/springboa...
Most of the links and graphics have now died!
But this was '95-ish and at uni some years earlier we had Mosaic and some very limited live access to the outside world, including isolated protocols such as FTP (ic.ac.uk was good) and Gopher... But Altavista in '95 really made a difference.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
I just about barfed the first time I unwittingly visited that.
The minimalist design featured black text with blue links on a white background.
The pages uses the default background, text and link color.
Those are white, black and blue in many browsers but by no means all.
If you set one of them, make sure you set all of them, otherwise your text or links could end up the same as the background color and become unreadable.
to allow citizens to share information for the greater public good. It was not created as a means for private profit or spying on its users.
Blue's News back in the day. I haven't read it in years. Still around.
https://www.bluesnews.com/
Steve Jobs and some folks from Pixar were going out to lunch one day. While walking out of the building, Steve said "we have to find the killer app for the Internet". Steve and I both had NeXT workstations on our desks, and they had the first Mosaic web browser for NeXTStep on them. I'm not sure I even tried that browser, but we both completely missed that this was the killer app for the Internet.
Bruce Perens.
I have ADD now, so gave up after that. Thanks. I remember watching it on my DECstation with 21" color monitor.
in the case for net neutrality.
The first ones I remember were Compuserve.com and Excite.com. Excite is still with us but Compuserve died a long time ago. First search engine I used was Altavista.
Also note the lack of safety equipment. Those were some heady days, dl, heady days.
NCSA Mosaic and the coffee pot with the camera on it.
My ISP - Ozemail - had a reasonably good home page. All the shareware archives were great - Simtelnet. AARNet for me (the Australia Academic and Research Network) - they held good mirrors of shareware sites.
A lot of tiny little user pages linked via webrings, although that was a little bit later.
Searching sucked. Google really cleaned up that space.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
This will clearly label me as Canadian, but in the run up to the trial, the judge put a gag order on information in order to provide a jury pool that hadn't formed opinions based on news reports of the rather sensational kidnapping and murders of two teenage girls as well as then uncommon knowledge that Mr. Bernardo was thought to be the "Scarborough Rapist" who was the subject of a manhunt in Toronto in the 1980s.
The news reports and other information about Paul Bernardo and his wife Karla could only be found on sites located outside of Canada and was one of the first examples of how the Interwebs would bypass and subvert laws.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Remember when you would check every day to see what sites had come online the day before. And then check all five of them out?
By the way, notice the quote: "Imagine if all newspapers became Internet service providers, now that would change the media landscape for sure," Daniels quipped.
Today, I am obliged to send Comcast $150 bucks a month, but I am reluctant to send the local newspaper a few bucks a month for access. What if the local paper had the wisdom in 1990 to become an ISP and wire the city with their page as your home page? They would not be going extinct.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
So fast.
So clean.
So awesome.
So Doge.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I prefer Purple.com
Besides the LOX demo and his invention of Refrigerant R-406A "AutoFrost", George was an Alpha Hardware Hacker at Purdue who presented at Usenix conferences. He got a grant to work on multiprocessing, and so he took two VAX 780's, and connected them by the backplane, creating a multiprocessor VAX. Digital Equipment liked it so much that they made a product of it, called the VAX/782. The CPU clock was 5 MHz and there were a lot of DIP-package digital logic ICs in there, with lots of space between them on the PCBs.
Bruce Perens.
So happy the CNN source article started with Tim. Anyone else and shame! ...but CNN did call themselves out as a "pioneer", so the article was self-shaming in the end...
Long live Tim and CERN!
In 1994, BBSs were still the dominant experience for the common man. However, the University had a dial-up line that was configured to use a Gopher client as shell, for purposes of searching an online card catalog for one of the libraries. I found I could use the search engines of the day, Archie and Jughead (and Veronica?) to find hosts offering free access to Lynx (the text-only browser) and even Telnet "gateways". Cyberspace.com was offering free trial Unix accounts, literally with no verification. They offered Pine, storage space and plenty of other things. I could now surf the whole existing web, Gopherspace, read Usenet and download files and warez from there. Since Zmodem was borked by the Gopher client I was connected through, I couldn't download directly. So, I used Pine to re-mail them to myself at a local BBS which had a nightly UUCP connection where it exchanged email (with bangs as well as @) and updated it's select Usenet posts.
At one point, I struggled to run DOSSLIP and DOSLYNX directly on my PC, but this never compared to just using a BBS dialup program and doing things on the terminal. I still use Lynx and (Al)Pine several times a week!
Another Lynx trick came in handy 5 years later: You could telnet to password.io.com from anywhere in the world, and log on as guest. Lynx was configured as the shell, and you would then be presented with the minimalist web-based customer tools found at http://password.io.com/ to reset your password, update your address, etc. IO forgot to disable browsing the filesystem (press g, period, enter). Also, IO never enforced uniform /home/user/ directory permissions or audited active accounts. As a result, through 2004, when IO was taken over by Prismnet (or later), you could roam around and directly view many customer's private files, email, and IO's sensitive system areas. This was a direct back-door into everything! That was a full two years after IOCOM "hardened" their network to sell network security services.
The Illuminati Online website is archived by an old employee here: http://io.fondoo.net/
"The minimalist design featured black text with blue links on a white background."
No it didn't. A quick glance at the HTML shows that it's in fact using browser defaulted font/colors.
I started clicking around, and Google popped up a malware warning for the "Astrophysics Abstracts" link at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/... .
Anyone know of a way to confirm or deny this warning, other than letting my computer get infected?
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
Well, there were two instances that stand out in my memory.
One was the Hot Sauce web site. It was back in 1994 or earlier 1993 perhaps, but I do remember it in 1994. It sold hot sauce. Hot hot hot or something was the tag-line.
And before that I do remember watching the Sunergy broadcast where Marc showed his new Browser XMosaic. I don't remember the web site that was show cased in the episode hosted by John Gage. I think this took place in early 1994 or late 1993. I forgot when, but it was something to watch. A remarkable event.
Jennicam!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I don't see any background color specified in the markup, and I'm not even sure it was possible to do that at that time.
The first web page I saw, in one of Netscape's first version, was later, but I remember that Netscape found it cool to have a grayish background back then rather than a white one. I think Mosaic had a gray background too. What was the browser used to display that first web page? How did it look like?
Cello. Followed by Mosaic.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Man y'all motherfuckers are old
* Instead of browsers generating errors about missing tags, they silently accept it. *facepalm*
* Who was the idiot that thought case insensitivity for tags name was a good idea??
A) Browsers now have to accept twice as many tags.
e.g. & and & both generate ampersands. You can start with <BLOCKQUOTE> and end with </blockquote>, etc.
B) We dumb grave accent tags, like À for À and à for à which prevents browsers from converting all tags to either uppercase (or lowercase) and generating a hash from _that_ that for fast lookup.
* Instead of using unique characters for begin tag: < >, and end tag: such as { }, browsers instead have to waste time looking ahead if the next character is a '/' when they find a '<' char.
i.e.
<a name='foo'>...</a>
compared to the simpler to parse:
<a name='foo'>...{a}
* Some of the HTML abbreviations make zero sense. These are the arrow glyphs:
←
→
↑
↓
/Sarcasm Argh, matey! What, &left; &right; &up; &down; weren't available?!
At least it isn't a badly designed and bloated as XML.
This Internet thing ... is it some kind of upgrade of the Fidonet they didn't tell us about?
Enough stalling. I've been trying to recall exactly when I moved from BBS systems to Internet access at home, and it kind of runs together in my mind. I first got AT&T worldnet in 1995. There wasn't that much difference in content available between BBS in a large city and the internet, or at least for what I wanted to see. I downloaded slackware onto a bunch of floppies around 1995, but I think that was from a BBS. Buzz on ZMODEM, buzz on.
The earliest web site I accessed that I remember the name of was AltaVista, and the second that I remember was portalofevil.com, which wasn't all that early. It's just what I remember. In between those two were all the various universities that had some presence online.
That was back when Lynx was still useful.
And so will you be one day..
For tech types AltaVista won because it was more comprehensive and had a cool array of search narrowing tools.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Aahh. and look how fast that page loads, devoid of all the needless crap we pile on now.
I don't have a grey beard (it wasn't THAT long ago and I was young) but I do remember downloading the entire IMDB as a file and parsing it with a reader. They would post periodic updates.
I was also the designer of the original set of icon buttons for web version of IMDB, which were made on my Amiga. Good times.
-Mike
It's a testament to how well designed the web was that the first web page still renders perfectly well in modern web browsers. If you view the source, you can see it was actually written in a proto-HTML and uses tags and attributes that aren't used today.
I remember the guys at the new start Google sending me a bottle of Wine for help in promoting their new search engine on my web site - The Cybervillage.
My site, Interguru.com , set up in 1995, may well be the first site to use then then-new file upoad facility. It performed a service, translating email address books from one format to another, such as Eudora to Pine, rather than just displaying information.
Does anyone know of a earlier site that used file uploads?
Best "search engine" at the time was probably gopher, until yahoo came around. Most of my web, was nothing more than bbs sites, on dialup.
I actually remember logging into the CERN web site when it first came out (thought it may have been a week or two after it went "live", so I probably missed the very first version). I recall going to it with a text mode browser, seeing how the links worked, thinking it was okay, and then going on to other sources for information at the time (remember gopher?) Little did I know how that idea would explode...
But the site wasn't minimalist by intentional design - early versions of HTML didn't support any kind of way of rendering text differently - in fact line mode browsers didn't render text differently at all - links just had numbers after them you could enter to access the link, and even basic formatting like bold and underline came later.
I liked TidBits about Apple news. Fetch for FTP. Eudora for mail. Netscape as a browser of choise over all others. Usenet had some things that were not porn or anarchy or some fetish.
Games were downloadable for free. Shareware. Before there was internet circa 1992 there was BBS, for the prior decade!
http://www.zombo.com/
You can do anything at Zombo.com. Anything at all!
Back in 1995, when the "under construction" signs were popular, my friends and I stumbled upon www.nike.com. Their site displayed a photo of a rotary phone, along with the words "The web site you've reached is not in service." My friends and I rolled our eyes at that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
....looking at that page using Mosaic back in 93 or so. And of course Gopher, which mostly died out as HTML came on the scene.
I about 10 years ago I put together the story of my first WWW pages. Both the 'history' and the actual pages seem very antique now.
http://brenthugh.com/Musicihist/history.html
I knew there was a reason I was using uppercase tags for years...
It was normal once.
Was one of the first things I remember making it to the web, was Scott's list. Though technically the list was first posted to bulletin boards,ftp servers and yes, finger.
For the young ones, here is what the internet looked like in 1993 The list itself was available by html in 1994, if not earlier
Copyright 1994 "http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~yanoff/yanoff.html" Scott Yanoff
And some background:
To this day, websites don't render the same way on all browsers and it's damn near impossible to design a page the same way that you used to design things in a desktop publisher. In addition, there are still a legion of incompetent page designers who insist on making things only work properly on Internet Explorer.
Not only do I remember when IMDb was a Usenet created list, but I printed it out on my university's printers (the really old kind that had those perforated holes on the side of the printout) to show to people offline.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I was quite into modding windows 3.1 (and Widows NT 3.1 and 3.51as well) at the time (late 90s) and had it running really well, plus a few really rare releases of programs that normally would nerver have run on it. So I frequented these pages that dealt with that.
Oh, and Nathan's page with the flames and IE is Evil! Needless to say it was a well designed if basic site,,,
We had web sites in the US way back into the 1980s. Xerox had hyperlinks, embeded into their docs. We also had internet news and archives on certain sites as well as gopher, etc. HTML is actually an American AIrforce invention, from the 1960s. So they're celebrating their version of the web. One copied from US sources. One built on top of all the US contributions.
https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~...
Oh yeah, Kuroshin.org and tons of alt.linux newsgroups in Usenet... Ah, and alt.religion.kibology!!!
-- 29A the number of the Beast