CERN Celebrates 20 Years of an Open Web (and Rebuilds 1st Web Page) 82
An anonymous reader writes "Twenty years ago CERN published a statement that made the World Wide Web ('W3,' or simply 'the web') technology available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish."
Reader Rambo Tribble adds that CERN "is recreating the very first web page to ever exist. Included in the effort are plans to use the original hardware, as well as software, that gave birth to our beloved WWW."
I wonder whether Lamar Smith (Score:2)
Would have approved.
Re: (Score:1)
Why do you presume the use of parentheses was not as intended? I read it as if it was verbal conversation where the parentheses indicated an "aside".
What's an example of a statement where you believe parentheses would be indicated?
Re:timothy, QUIT IT, YOU FLAMING MORON (Score:5, Funny)
QUIT USING PARENTHESES EVERYWHERE. Did you fourth grade teacher instruct you on ANYTHING? ... From where did you graduate? Bovine University?
He probably graduated from MIT, the AI Lab.
Re:I wonder whether Lamar Smith (Score:4, Insightful)
Who gives a fuck what some luser thinks?
I do, and you should too. [xkcd.com]
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It was funny to read when it came out. It's even funny when clicking on the button on the site and seeing it. It's NOT funny when someone links to it from a one-sentence post and thinks they're so fucking clever to have discovered xkcd.
It's completely appropriate, seeing as the person in question is a religious wacko heading the United States House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Among other things, he thinks that medicine is evil and faith is a panacea.
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He'd probably be conflicted. This 'WWW' stuff is a bunch of pointy-headed eurocommie academic bullshit designed for distributing things like scientific papers and porn; but the network it runs on top of is good, solid, ARPA-designed, National Defense research designed to keep the communications up even when Ivan drops the bomb.
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Nice one, fuzzy. Thanks for the best chuckle of the day.
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Of course not. The world-wide web has no obvious defense application, it isn't an obvious benefit to the welfare of the public, and it merely duplicates the work of people like Ted Nelson in the 1960s [wikipedia.org], or industry-funded efforts like Apple's Hypercard [wikipedia.org]. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars. Grant denied.
And this page will be (Score:4, Funny)
plans to use the original hardware, as well as software,
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slashdotted in a matter of seconds
plans to use the original hardware, as well as software,
Hacked in 3 2 1 ....
Re:And this page will be (Score:5, Funny)
Are there actually any exploits available for NEXTstep on 68030?
I don't doubt that vulnerabilities exist; but that's a platform that, er, makes Amiga look like a contender...
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, you are right that there were vulnerabilities. I remember that one of the more fun ones was based on filesystem operators that existed in Display Postscript used for the Window Server. They were fully enabled by default in earlier versions of NextStep. This allowed you to do cool things like opening files on a remote computer by sending a malicious Postscript file, which was happily interpreted and displayed by the receiving machine's Mail.app program (both a cool feature and, in this case, a tragic
Next Project (Score:4, Funny)
The first porn site restored . . .
Surely, this is archived somewhere.
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Re:Next Project (Score:4, Insightful)
The first porn site restored . . .
Surely, this is archived somewhere.
The first porn site would far pre-date this -- there were plenty of "story" porn sites running on Gopher servers, FTP sites, BBS sites running via telnet, newsgroups.
The Internet was full of porn for a very long time before HTTP came around.
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One of the early Gopher/FTP sites was at tudelft and was called the Digital Archive on the 17th Floor (List of websites founded before 1995). This small image archive contained some low quality scanned pornographic images that were initially available to anyone anonymously, but the site soon became restricted to Netherlands only access.
Unfortunately the link [tudelft.nl] is dead. And even searching for the archive using archive.org database, the earliest I could find was December 2, 1998. The porn was already deleted.
If anyone saved that picture archive, please notice that what you have is data is a landmark in human history(Just like that Playboy picture used in computer graphics). Quoting Dr. Jones: This archive belongs in a museum!
Al Gore.... (Score:3, Funny)
Worked at CERN?
I never would have guessed that.
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Hosted on a NeXT computer? (Score:3)
In a way, we can say that Steve Jobs invented the Web!
Take THAT, Al Gore!
P.S.: I don't know anyone named Tim Berners-Lee.
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It's well worth reading his book:
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/ [w3.org]
I hope they have better luck w/ their NeXT Cube than I have w/ mine --- still haven't found the time to work out why it quit booting.... though I may have to put some effort into that if I don't find a better alternative to Macromedia FreeHand than going back to Altsys Virtuoso.
Should they be thanked for this? (Score:4, Interesting)
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But, it must have been the first website for the guy who made it.
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Should we thank them, or go looking for some tar and feathers?
I don't recognize this feathers command.
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You need to install [sourceforge.net] it first...
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I know that the genius idea on Unix is to have a large number of small applications that do one job and do it well - so unlike with zip/arj/rar we get to choose our archiving and compressing software independently of each others, or even combine them with something totally different for reason that the authors of these programs couldn't even have thought when they made the tools, but still... ...why would anyone combine tar with feather(s?)? :P
Experience of the first ever webpage (Score:3)
"Wow!! Those blink tags are going to be so useful!"
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Followed by "If only there were a way to add musical accompaniment."
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...And dancing hamsters.
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Sometimes I miss dancing hamsters.
But then I sober up.
Re:Experience of the first ever webpage (Score:4, Funny)
If you miss dancing hamsters, you need to improve your aim.
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Can they do that? The music was actually from a Disney film, but sped up.
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I feel so guilty and ashamed of my past right now... But then again, in the mid-90's, which DooM related website didn't have the game music as .mid - accompanied by animated doom guy or imp.
Problem loading page... (Score:1)
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Well, I can't get to it myself either, but I am pretty sure it just returns "Hello, World."
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After a number of attempts, I was able to get the home page, it looks like this (links are dummied)
World Wide Web
The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia [slashdot.org] information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.
Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary [slashdot.org] of the project, Mailing lists [slashdot.org] , Policy [slashdot.org] , November's W3 news [slashdot.org] , Frequently Asked Questions [slashdot.org].
What's out there? [slashdot.org]
Pointers to the world's onlin
Journalists (Score:4, Interesting)
How long until ignorant journalists start claiming the Internet is 20 years old today?
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Any bets... (Score:2)
Any bets that it will get slashdotted when it goes live? This assumes CERN will make it accessible to the 'net in general.
Cheers,
Dave
Re:Arg (Score:5, Informative)
He isn't credited with creating the internet. He's credited with creating the WWW.
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Direct link to the site (Score:5, Informative)
Here: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html [info.cern.ch]
We've successfully slashdotted the first web page. (Score:2)
Damn timey-wimey stuff.
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I'm sorry, but there is nothing special about HTTP.
I was at uni studying CS when HTTP was invented, that's exactly what I thought, boy was I wrong!
I also shrugged at Java - "1970's pcode in a new dress, so what".
That's awesome (Score:1)
Re: That's awesome (Score:1)
2800 baud? Non-standard speed.
You must mean 2400 baud or 28.8Kb.
Misleading summary (Score:2, Informative)
Included in the effort are plans to use the original hardware, as well as software, that gave birth to our beloved WWW.
Well, yes, they are preserving the hardware, the software, and the content. But they are doing all three separately; the box has been repaired, the HD has been imaged onto a CD, and the pages have been archived and are being re-hosted at the original URL.
They are not going to use the original NeXT box to host those pages.
I'd credit Marc Andreesen too (Score:3)
Re:I'd credit Marc Andreesen [and Eric Bina] too (Score:3)
There, fixed that subject line for you.
Learn your history. Eric Bina [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Bina] co-authored Mosaic along with Mr. Andreesen, and I'll bet there were other team members at the NCSA who made non-trivial contributions to the project. At Netscape I doubt he did any development at all. Marc's fame came from being a well-known dot-com businessman, not for single-handedly developing the graphical web browser.
Not in that much a hurry for my Pr0n (Score:2)
When I saw the first browser online, I can't remember it's name but the description
mentioned seeing a pictures from a distant location. I just assumed it was a new
terminal program and didn't need to save the few seconds viewing downloaded pix.
The fact there were only one or two places it worked on; a struggling terminal program.
Needless to say I passed on it, running my first browser a year later on Win95.
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I think the first browser I saw was Mosaic in library - I didn't know anything about web except that there was supposed to be hypertext links and images mixed in text on webpages. I didn't know where to go - but there was a huge address book, an "internet phonebook" if you will with subject categories.
I don't think the librarian knew what the book was about or about the computer and software either. There was only standard installation of Windows 3.? with only the Mosaic, if I remember correctly, to use for
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It may sound funny, but I really do miss the simpler days of the WWW. Yes, I know... horrible tables, banner texts, under construction signs, and the dreaded blink tag. I miss Geocities. I miss personal "home pages". I miss Web rings.
Strange that it is I know what you mean and share, up to some amount, the same feelings.
You know what I also miss? BBS systems, actually dialing up them (not the newfangled telnet connection which was just a useless layer to slow down the communication which wasn't exactly fast to begin with), playing Lord on them, sharing pirated applications via zmodem protocol, and most of all I miss Fidonet. But these things don't really compare to what you said because they actually weren't crap, they were awesome - an
I, for one, welcome our ancient overlords. (Score:2)
First web page?
No disclaimer!
No privacy statement!
Probably no multiple languages, violating some European law.
I can't believe people survived without the wisdom of our masters!