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?)

Comments

Summary is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A reminder that the web was created

[Snufu]

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.

Classic Steve Jobs and the Nascent Web

[Bruce Perens]

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.

Re:Toll please, consumer

[DamonHD]

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...

My Back door to the Internet

[pepsikid]

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/

Re:My Back door to the Internet

[adolf]

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.

The first search war between Yahoo! and AltaVista

[localroger]

For tech types AltaVista won because it was more comprehensive and had a cool array of search narrowing tools.

Re:And no slashdot effect?

[nukenerd]

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.