Slashdot Mirror
On This Day 25 Years Ago, the Web Became Public Domain (popularmechanics.com)
On April 30, 1993, CERN -- the European Organization for Nuclear Research -- announced that it was putting a piece of software developed by one of its researchers, Tim Berners-Lee, into the public domain. That software was a "global computer networked information system" called the World Wide Web, and CERN's decision meant that anyone, anywhere, could run a website and do anything with it. From a report: While the proto-internet dates back to the 1960s, the World Wide Web as we know it had been invented four year earlier in 1989 by CERN employee Tim Berners-Lee. The internet at that point was growing in popularity among academic circles but still had limited mainstream utility. Scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf had developed Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which allowed for easier transfer of information. But there was the fundamental problem of how to organize all that information.
In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks. In a proposal, Berners-Lee asked CERN management to "imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse."
Four years later, the project was still growing. In January 1993, the first major web browser, known as MOSAIC, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While there was a free version of MOSAIC, for-profit software companies purchased nonexclusive licenses to sell and support it. Licensing MOSAIC at the time cost $100,000 plus $5 each for any number of copies.
In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks. In a proposal, Berners-Lee asked CERN management to "imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse."
Four years later, the project was still growing. In January 1993, the first major web browser, known as MOSAIC, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While there was a free version of MOSAIC, for-profit software companies purchased nonexclusive licenses to sell and support it. Licensing MOSAIC at the time cost $100,000 plus $5 each for any number of copies.
And the world has never been more divided.
Those were the good old days, when there were lots of different web sites and if you didn't like one, you could go to another. Many of us remember "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Somehow we got to a point where Facebook and Google interpret the free Internet as damage and route around it.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Back then domain names were $100 for 2 years. Hosting was an additional $10/mo or so, if you weren't fortunate enough to be at a school or work someplace which let you set up your own web server (I had one for myself, and another for my dog - IPv4 addresses were plentiful back then too).
Those costs are what drove people to "free" web services like GeoCities, MySpace, and eventually Facebook. You can justify the cost to set up your own domain and website if it's going to be a business venture or a major part of your online profile. But for the vast majority of people, it wasn't worth it. Which is what allowed the personal-info-harvesting vultures to swoop in and take over the web as we know it today. In some ways I think it was actually better before the web, when simply having an account on an Internet service automatically gave you a finger profile you could fill out however you wanted at no additional cost.
Nowadays most ISPs also give you some free web space (and an email address) with your account. But it's too little, too late.