World Wide Web Turns 20 Today 169
girlmad writes "On 6 August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, then a humble scientist at CERN, made the first page on the World Wide Web publicly available in a move that, unbeknown to him at the time, would change the world more quickly and profoundly than anything before or since." Wired also has a retrospective, noting that "[i]t can be hard now, even for many of us who regularly used the Internet before there was a World Wide Web, to remember that there was a time when the two terms weren’t considered nearly synonymous by the general public." For those who remember, what was your first experience with the Web per se? For me, it was in 1993 or early 1994, with an excited demonstration of Mosaic on Sun workstations in the Geology department at the University of Texas.
It was one of many protocols in '91/'92 (Score:2, Interesting)
During fall of 1991 and 1992, the World Wide Web ended up as one of many protocols one used to find information. At the time, you had multiple protocols -- gopher, FTP, heck, even some places like wuarchive had public NFS mounts. For searches, you had archie and veronics (for the gopherspace).
The first time I used a Web browser was on a NeXT, and the first Web server I used was MacHTTPD on a cast off Performa.
I feel old now...
Ahh ... good times ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I certainly remember seeing NCSA Mosaic for the first time.
But I also remember downloading stuff from the usenet alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* newsgroups and needing to edit out the headers, cat them together, and then run the whole thing through uudecode. Good times -- that's partly how I learned vi. ;-)
Oh, and of course both UUCP bang path addressing as well as the funky ones we had on the VAXes at school to translate from DECNet or whatever it was ... IN% or something before what we'd recognize now as a proper email address.
ftp.sunsite,unc.edu ... the ftp repository at White Sands Missile Range
Oooh, and SLIP on a Linux box ... that was pretty awesome. There was a lot of "internet" stuff before most anybody knew about the "world wide web". I remember trying to explain it to people in the way back, and getting looked at like I'd gone off my rocker.
And I didn't even need pants. ;-)
"It's like Gopher, but better" (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it must have been 1993; possibly 1994 - I was shown Mosaic by another student. I remember thinking it was like some kind of mix between Hypercard and gopher. I can't remember what the first site I visited was. I do remember that all web pages were grey and left-justified, though.
1993 NCSA Mosaic (Score:5, Interesting)
missing the best way to experience the Internet...Its so good, I think
we should make a WWW server [here], and get a [256kbps] connection to
the Internet." -- Rick Richardson, 9 Aug 1993
Re:My First Online Experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks, kids, Now I feel REALLY old. I was 31 when I first got on line, that was in 1983 on Compuserve. To tell the truth, it was pretty useless -- but so were both of my computers, a TS-1000 and a TRS-80 MC10, neither of which had any decent software I didn't write myself. I sold a little software for the MC10 after putting a classified in (IIRC) Byte Magazine. God but getting Compuserve cancelled was hard!
I was on BBSes around 88 or 89 after I bought a used IBM-XT. That and shareware got me into computer games.
Back then you couldn't get on the internet without a credit card, and we were dirt poor and didn't have one. In '97 Family Video offered internet access, unlimited access for $12 per month and you could pay cash, and they weren't kidding about unlimited. It came with hosting, and I abused the hell out of it with my 33.6 modem. I made web pages for my favorite games, and some teenager emailed me asking if I played Quake. Of course I played Quake! He encouraged me to make a Quake page; I guess I was good at it, because I got emails about my Road Rash site from people who thought it was EA's site.
The Quake site was the one I abused Family Video with. I uploaded patches, skins, maps, you name it. FV's servers must have been pretty fast, because some folks told me they'd wait until I uploaded a patch because it would download faster.
I was pretty proud of that site. A couple months after starting it I submitted an article to Planet Quake, who posted it with a link to my site and it really took off after that. Everybody was linking me; Blue's News would have a link every couple of weeks or so. I got to where I spent a lot more time on the site than playing Quake!
My youngest, Patty, was a fan of online Roger Rabbit, and one day she came to me with wide etes and said "dad, did you know you were famous?" Seems a lot of the kids were my fans!
Man, I had a lot of fun back then, especially after I had a boss who discovered I was doing things at work that people earning three times what I was couldn't, and got me a big promotion and raise. So we bought a big house on 7th street, Evil-X went to school and pretty much didn't spend any time at all with the kids and me, and she wound up moving out.
Yeah, I'm putting the Paxil Diaries in book form. I promise! For you who aren't acquainted, I'd joined /. (which started about the same time as the Springfield Fragfest, my Quake site) but didn't post much; I was too busy with Quake. After Evil-X moved out I started posting diaries on K5; that was the Paxil Diaries. They were about music, reefer, drinking, and unsuccessfully chasing women.
Patty and Leila are still big into gaming; Patty's assistant manager of a GameStop now. Tell her "hi" if you see her, she's the hot 24 year old with a treble clef tattood on one arm and a bass clef on the other. Her picture's on my Google+ page.
Most of you guys are probably not much older than them, and a lot of you are even younger. No, I won;t tell you to get off my lawn. Especially if you hand me a beer or a lit joint.