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

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.

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/