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."
Direct link to the site (Score:5, Informative)
Here: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html [info.cern.ch]
Re:Arg (Score:5, Informative)
He isn't credited with creating the internet. He's credited with creating the WWW.
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they are doing all three separately; the box has been repaired, the HD has been imaged onto a CD, and the pages have been archived and are being re-hosted at the original URL.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.
Re:And this page will be (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 mistake). It was good for a few harmless pranks between workstations on a LAN. After this "feature" became widely known, it became routine to redefine a "secure" context within any program by nulling out the Postscript operators that could be used for such purposes, and in later versions this state became the default mode of operation. I'm sure there are plenty of other things left, though.
Despite such mistakes, with its UNIX underpinnings NextStep was reasonably secure for its day (it was no Solaris, but compared to Windows...). As you imply, part of that was being a rare enough system for it to have been targeted in the first place. However, it is a bit much to imply that it isn't a significant contender in any sense, given that OS X is effectively a later version of NextStep. It's gotten more malware attention as its popularity has increased over the years.