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The World's First Web Site Celebrates 25 Years Online (info.cern.ch)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the 1991-called dept.

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?)

18 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Toll please, consumer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If that page was made today, it would be spread out over 5 pages, have 32 trackers and self playing ads with sound.

    1. Re:Toll please, consumer by DamonHD · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In the very very early days of my UK ISP I had to ask the US NSF for permission to send 'commercial' packets across the Internet core routers!

      Sadly I have lost their (paper) letter granting me that permission.

      Rgds

      Damon

      Oblig: http://www.exnet.com/springboa...

      --
      http://m.earth.org.uk/
  2. First cool site was 'the liquid oxygen barbecue' by destinyland · · Score: 2

    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...

  3. Re:Web Crawler by pepsikid · · Score: 2

    What is this 'web' you refer to? Is it part of SnapChat?

  4. My own ISP site! by DamonHD · · Score: 2

    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/
  5. Summary is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. A reminder that the web was created by Snufu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:What, no goat.se? by bheerssen · · Score: 2

    I trust that there are still plenty of mirrors available. I also trust you can find them if you are so inclined. Please forgive me if I'm too, umm... lazy to do that for you.

    --
    (Score: -1, Stupid)
  8. This little gaming news website... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

    Blue's News back in the day. I haven't read it in years. Still around.

    https://www.bluesnews.com/

  9. Classic Steve Jobs and the Nascent Web by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  10. US Information Sources on Paul Bernardo Killings by mykepredko · · Score: 2

    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
  11. My Back door to the Internet by pepsikid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/

    1. Re:My Back door to the Internet by adolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Are you me?

      I remember it being cyberspace.org, not .com. I also recall that it wasn't a trial at all, but that it survived on kick-backs from the local telco for connection fees from long-distance callers. The phone bills - those are things my parents will never forget. Likewise on the MS-DOS based SLIP connections: It sure seemed like it ought to be better, but packetization delays with TCP/IP over a 14.4k modem made it fairly hellish compared to just using a Telemate for a terminal emulator.

      Around the same time I was also using a borrowed, freebie alumni account on the local University's VAX, with almost no storage quota. It was nice, but their modems were only 9600bps, backed by a 56k leased line to Sprint.

      Later on, I discovered io.com and their 10 megabyte disk quota (with lots more, temporarily, for free if you asked nice) seemed dreamy in comparison. This lead to IRC and a decent Usenet feed, which lead to a lost childhood. 9600 became kind of slow for this use, but Delphi provided just enough Unix-y stuff to get to an io.com shell reliably at somewhat higher speeds. (I still hate web-based forums and long for the simplicity of tin, even though tin itself was considered ridiculously featureful at the time.)

      Security was lax, but people (everywhere) made the Internet a much friendlier and trusting place than it is in today's secure-by-default, impossible-to-share-anything mentality (which isn't really any better). It wasn't long after I discovered that /home/* wasn't locked down at all, that I also discovered how to keep some of my own files to myself.

      I also liked io.com's announcements, where jrcloose and company would rant, often in some depth, about whatever nefarious technical struggle they were solving today, and Steve Jackson himself would sometimes write about...whatever the fuck Steve wanted to write about. I learned a lot from those pages (though I can't call them blogs, because blogs weren't a thing yet).

      Muscle memory still requires me to type "ping io.com" when checking a system for DNS and IP connectivity.

      Ah, the freewheeling days of yore, where building a mail server just meant setting up Sendmail, some manner of POP3 and IMAP access, sorting out the MX record, and just leaving port 25 open for all and sundry to use -- because there was just no need to do anything more restrictive at the time.

      And the Corel NetWinder, where everyone was sure that ARM was the future -- 18 years ago. http://www.netwinder.org/about...

      Are we there yet?

      Oh. Right: Back on topic, I was a kid then. Getting this shit working in useful (and/or interesting) ways required problem-solving skills, which are processes that are now indelibly burned into my brain's wiring.

      These days, I can troubleshoot just about anything.

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
    2. Re:My Back door to the Internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      ..Security was lax, but people (everywhere) made the Internet a much friendlier and trusting place than it is in today's secure-by-default, impossible-to-share-anything mentality (which isn't really any better).

      This is a thing that a lot of the younger audience won't understand, there were known security holes in a lot of the systems but we didn't really care as no-one abused them.

      As an example, from around mid-late '93 to Dec 1997 I allowed anyone who could drive a ftp client to upload pages anonymously to a 'public' section of my web server here in the UK, there were all sorts of things there from early Java programmers, Texan Bands, Digital artists, Fan clubs, people just playing with html..the only rule I had in place was 'no pornography' and, for all the years it ran, there wasn't any uploaded. Considering that all accesses were anonymous, and that they could overwrite all the stuff that other people uploaded, there was no vandalism..I allowed cgi scripts to be run, there were no attempts to 'hack' my server..the people using the service were, without prompting, taking the great man at his word and not 'pishing in the water supply'.

      There was a 'community' spirit back in the early days, I think partially because for a lot of the people involved it was the same sort of spirit which used to exist all over society when they were younger, back where you didn't have to lock your doors when you weren't in and it wasn't a strange thing for neighbours to come into your house 'unannounced' (some of us lived in such societies up 'till the late '70s, then the rot set in).

  12. Jennicam by weave · · Score: 2

    Jennicam!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  13. The first search war between Yahoo! and AltaVista by localroger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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:[.]
  14. Re:And no slashdot effect? by nukenerd · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well prepared, well prepared.

    No preparation needed, it just has no baggage. It's a long time since I saw a page load so fast.

  15. Re:And no slashdot effect? by pepsikid · · Score: 2

    I hate websites where the elements keep squirming around. I click a spot and nothing happens. Then the objects shift over and the page takes a click on the thing that wasn't there when I clicked.