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The Internet GUI Networking Software

World Wide Web Turns 20 Today 169

Posted by timothy from the why-it-can-barely-vote-yet dept.
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.
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World Wide Web Turns 20 Today More

World Wide Web Turns 20 Today

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  • It was one of many protocols in '91/'92 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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...

  • My first experience going online was Prodigy, and the first website I ever visited was www.discovery.com, circa 1996ish

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Mine was using Archie to find porn - back then, they were all stills, in the snow, uphill, both ways!

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kerashi ( 917149 )

      My first experience going online was also with Prodigy, which my parents promptly cancelled after they got the telephone bill with all the long distance charges. It wasn't till 97 when I turned 18 and moved out of the sticks that I was able to get on again, with a 56k dialup modem.

      • Re:My First Online Experience (Score:5, Interesting)

        by mcgrew ( 92797 ) * on Saturday August 06, 2011 @02:34PM (#37009548) Homepage Journal

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MrKaos ( 858439 )

          I used to play the "How can I get Net access for free" - game and was pretty good at it until about mid 00s. I remember starting out with newsgroups and email around 87 and BBS while I was still at school in 83. TRS-80 (Model 1 :-), C64 and TRS-80 Color Computer, a System-80 with a S-100 bus and of course my original IBM PC with cassette interface and basic roms on board (which, incidentally, still powered up until a few years ago when I chucked it out).

          Yep, I got picked on a school but I knew what interes

  • my brother installed some stuff on 3.11 that had what I guess tcp/ip stack(slip probably) and a browser that worked with it, I don't remember it's name but it wasn't netscape for sure and it wasn't trumpet which did the tcp/ip, of that I'm fairly sure. the first real internet was on this one bbs that had early linux connected to internet available for members, later it turned into more of a smalltime isp, moved away from that to different provider for isdn access. why can't web pages be more like they were

    • I remember all of this as well. My first experience seeing the web was at the JPL open house in 1993. The pages they had loaded up were JPL, NCSA and CERN. I remember my first thoughts were its like gopher but with inline pictures.

      I'm sure everyone wants to forget the pain of the old days too. Installing trumpet stack on your Windows 3.1 box and then struggling for days trying to figure out what was going wrong. Oh and don't forget having to install the 32-bit extension on to old 16-bit Windows so tha

    • Trumpet winsock or whatever most likely. That's what I had to use. And I remember downloading a game (can't remember which) from happy puppy on a 2400 baud modem. Left it to download over night only to find out the connection dropped for whatever reason at 900k of the 1.2 M game. That's sucked!

    • my brother installed some stuff on 3.11 that had what I guess tcp/ip stack(slip probably) and a browser that worked with it, I don't remember it's name but it wasn't netscape for sure and it wasn't trumpet which did the tcp/ip, of that I'm fairly sure. the first real internet was on this one bbs that had early linux connected to internet available for members, later it turned into more of a smalltime isp, moved away from that to different provider for isdn access. why can't web pages be more like they were with around when netscape 2.0 got out? content was king once, not the layout.. also early on, why was everything available for linux so well? realplayers and all - it's like 1995 was the year of linux on desktop.

      This might very well have been Spry Internet in a Box [wikipedia.org]. Used it myself, was a very good product at the time. It included a full winsock tcp/ip stack, and AirMosaic [wikipedia.org] browser, in addition to clients for Usenet, Telnet, Gopher, FTP and email.

  • My first Internet and Web Experiences (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    My first experience with the Internet was when I brought home a computer and modem from work and opened an Internet access account with IBM (now part of AT&T's network) back in 1994. At the time I didn't know what a browser was, so no web at that point. At the time I was using OS/2 and had the Internet Access Kit installed, so I had some Internet-related applications to use. I spent a few weeks using Gopher reading various texts, but at the time local BBS's were far more developed and easier to use, plu

  • really big in the local bbs's someone tipped us off that the public library had hooked up their card catalog bbs service to the internet and was offering web access though lynx ... it was fucking awesome

  • Ahh ... good times ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @12:44PM (#37008610) Homepage

    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. ;-)

    • While Sir Tim was busy inventing I was jazzed about GEnie, Compuserve, and AppleLink. I couldn't imagine things getting so much more sophisticated. Then 4 years later I used the "View Source" command for the first time. I immediately grokked what HTML was about. Biggest rush EVAR! I was also not wearing pants.

      Thanks, Sir Tim, for the long-lasting endorphin high and the savings on my laundry bills.

    • But I also remember downloading stuff from the usenet alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*....

      Hah I remember everybody denying they looked at porn.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ae1294 ( 1547521 )

      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. ;-)

      wait.... but then how did you learn emacs?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Yep. I had to use emulated SLIP and PPP through TIA and SLiRP on dial-up modems since my college/university didn't have real PPP and SLIP. Also, only three dial-up connections. Of course, me hogged one of them most of the times. Hah!

  • 1993 (Score:3)

    by cashman73 ( 855518 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @12:45PM (#37008618) Journal
    My first experience with the World Wide Web was similar to subby -- it was in the Sun lab at the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University. The browser was NCSA Mosaic, and the workstations were about half black & white and half color. The rise of the Web started minor fights for the color monitors! Back in these days, the Web was pre-Google (or should I say, "BG", as opposed to "AG" ;-) . . . the home page was set to the local ODUCS website, and from there you could go to the NCSA Mosaic "What's New on the WWW" page and find interesting stuff. Plus, there was also the horny geeks on the 17th floor (p0rn), somewhere in Belgium,. . . ;-) Then, along came the Cool Site of the Day, featuring a new site every day of the week, which was fun. Back in those days, things were so new I never expected that I'd watch most TV shows via the Internet or access the WWW on my iPhone,. . .

    • I probably first saw the Web around 1993 or 1994. It was Mosaic on Windows 3.1 using Trumpet Winsock.

      I hosted my first Web server on the same platform, using ZBserver, in 1994. I had no administrative access to any *n*x boxes at the time, just Netware servers and VAXen, and I wasn't about to mess around with those, so I ran the web service on my desktop. I switched that to Windows 95 and the corresponding version of ZBserver fairly quickly, of course. I used to keep the log window open, so I could see w

  • I fondly remember going to my 6th form library in 1997 to visit totalannihilation.com on Bondi Blue iMacs to download new units onto a floppy disk every week. I was savvy enough to understand that the floppy disk needed to be formatted for FAT32 and the Mac could read them but Windows being the ignorant computer citizen it was, couldn't read Mac formatted disks.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      its not that windows was being ignorant, they just didn't want to pay the licensing fee for a damn near dead propitiatory format that even apple had dropped by then

      • MMMmmmm, no. Mac had (and used) variable-speed motors in their floppy drives. Wintel machines physically could not read Mac disks -- they were not compatible at the hardware level.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

          they only used the variable speed motors on the 800k format, 1.44 meg "superdisks" dropped that and outside of software they work the same way as your pc drive via standard speed and mfm.

          Thanks for playing

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jo_ham ( 604554 )

        HFS was replaced in 1998 by HFS+, but was supported by Apple up until earlier this year when OS X Lion was released - you can no longer format or write to HFS volumes in Lion, they are read only.

        Not bad for a "damn near dead" proprietary format (that is part of Apple's open source offerings, along with HFS+)

        hfsutils (open source) has been available since 1996 or so enabling the totally free, licence-fee-free use of HFS formatted disks on non-Apple systems to this day.

        Don't let your Apple hate get in the way

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

          no I am looking at no one in 1998 owned a mac so no one cared angle, its one of the reasons I still own a 603e machine, simply so I can make mac floppy disk's and HFS+ was never used on floppy's which is what were talking about here

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jo_ham ( 604554 )

            You're contradicting yourself - you are claiming that HFS was "near dead" and are now claiming "HFS+ was never used on floppies", unless you're saying "no one cared about floppies because they were near dead [in 1998]" but that's a different issue. You were specifically talking about HFS.

            Still, it remains accurate that you could use HFS formatted disks in non-Apple machines since 1996 due to the GPL licenced hfsutil. They certainly didn't have to pay any "licensing fee" to Apple for use of the format, which

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

              you can still write in in a dead language it doesn't make it any less dead and I dont understand your confusion HFS and HFS+ are two different things, by 1996 they were giving it away cause no one used it anymore except for apple macintosh floppies, hard disks were in HFS+, but by this time no one cares cause every fucking manufacture in the world accepted the same drive specs years before and they weren't apple's cutesy hack locked in propitiatory bullshit.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by jo_ham ( 604554 )

                My goodness, the hate is strong in this one. I think we need to simplify things to make it easier for you to understand through your frothing Apple hate.

                1) I am aware that HFS and HFS+ are different things, albeit related.

                2) Hard disks were not "in HFS+" in 1996 - it wasn't introduced until 1998 with OS 8.1.

                3) HFS and HFS+ are not "locked in bullshit" they are open, documented specifications released under an open source licence. You have never needed to pay fees or royalties to use it.

                4) As far as it being

      • That to me is ignorance, MS never wanted to pay licensing for just about everything, computer formats or Helvetica. Like I said, they were ignorant and making my life hard just for transferring a megabyte on a floppy from computer to computer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by yuhong ( 1378501 )

      The iMac existed in 1997?

  • All I have to say is, thank you. (Score:3)

    by WebManWalking ( 1225366 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @12:48PM (#37008640)
    The World Wide Web has been very, very good to me. Thank you, TBL.

    • I second that. He is one of the guys that make nobiliary titles appear as something good. I remember Mosaic and Netscape running in SPARC stations and SGI Indigo machines at my city university's top computer lab in late 1994-mid 1995.

      Thank you Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

  • Don't we all remember banging away on our 300 baud modem thinking it was FAST.... Oh the memories.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wsxyz ( 543068 )
      I don't remember thinking 300 baud was fast, but it worked. It was great for reading long textfiles as the characters appeared on the screen just about as fast as I could read them. Getting the 1200 baud modem, though, changed everything. Suddenly you could download software without tying up the phone line for half the day.

      • Exactly. Unless you were used to using a 110baud acoustically coupled modem, 300 was still slow. And you could still whistle into the phone and make it print characters on the screen. 1200baud - now that was cool, and 2400 was just ludicrous (when they worked, which was suspect at times), as well as being beyond the budget of those of us still in school.

    • Don't we all remember banging away on our 300 baud modem thinking it was FAST....

      Oh the memories.

      Bah! You kids! I remember my first real job. Our group's terminal had a 300 baud connection to the main computer in the same building. Ah, yes, basking in the sickly orange glow of the terminal - 1981 was good times...

      I was the kid in the group, and the only one with computing skills. Seriously, sometimes if you typed fast enough you could stop and watch the letters on the screen appear after the fact.

  • Yes, I know this was some years later ... Comic Book Guy: "Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace: The Final Brassiere.Oh hurry up, I'm a busy man. Ugh, this high-speed modem is intolerably slow."

  • "It's like Gopher, but better" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by EnglishTim ( 9662 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @01:07PM (#37008802)

    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.

    • That was my comment on seeing a secretary at Goddard Space Flight Center had one of the first versions of Mosaic (Summer 93?). I was already good at finding stuff with gopher and archie; I didn't need yet another interface.

      I will say, though, that by the spring of '94, I had changed my tune, and I told my wife that "in the future" you would see trucks and billboards with web addresses instead of 1-800 numbers. It is very possibly my only prescient statement regarding mass marketing, and I failed to act on i

      • I have a few of those: Drive through windows on coffee shops, universal remote controls built into phaser and tricorder housings, a button on your TV that makes your remote beep.

    • I do remember that all web pages were grey and left-justified, though.

      They still are [apple.com].

  • I'm not nearly as tech-old as you people, but I still remember the days before Google where someone would give you their h.t.t.p.colon.slash.slash website which you'd view on Netscape.

    • Re:Happy Birthday (Score:5, Informative)

      by kvvbassboy ( 2010962 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @01:18PM (#37008910)
      What? What about ask.com, altavista.com and yahoo.com? In fact, altavista as a search engine was the "google" of yesterday.

      • I remember altavista, but I didn't use search engines that much in those days. Its not like the 'search browsing' of today.

      • In fact, altavista as a search engine was the "google" of yesterday.

        Altavista's raging.com was the google of yesterday. Raging stripped out all the 'OMG we're not just a search engine we're a Portal!!' cruft that had accumulated on the major search engines and got back to search basics, circa 1999 or so.

      • And before that, you could buy internet yellow pages, as in actual hardcopy books that would come to you in the mail. It looked like an AT&T yellow pages, if you can find one of them around. And you could look up addresses and find where you wanted to go.

  • 1993 NCSA Mosaic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rick Richardson ( 87058 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @01:08PM (#37008828) Homepage
    "If you haven't tried NCSA Mosaic to travel the Internet, then you are
    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

    • 256 kbps? You people are crazy. The bits will get confused if you try to move them at that speed. In fact, having cables like that near farmland will make chickens stop laying.

  • Dialing into message boards and private networks that had internet access.

    I tried AOL im sure but that could not have lasted more than a month or so.

    Then I found Best and found a home.

  • In 93, when www first "arrived" with Mosaic, but one technical leader said: Yeah but we already have the "gopher" protocol. Why do we need this?

  • I had a college classmate who had just returned from an internship in Switzerland: "Let me show you something I helped work on this summer..." We had been using Gopher, of course, and individual command-line networking tools (even on our NeXTStations), but this was something...different. When I mentioned that it was cool, but didn't offer much content, my classmate was quick to answer: "but think of what we can use it for!" I wasn't there for the birth, but I did see it smile for the first time...

  • I don't know where i would be without it.

    • I don't know where i would be without it.

      Given that my official job title contains the word "Web"... I'm not sure where I'd be either!

      Fighting crime, maybe?

  • Microsoft must take a lot of the blame for the confusion in the public mind between "The Internet" and "The World Wide Web". By calling their web browser "Internet Explorer" they misled a lot of people right from the start. Yes, you can use it to access stuff other than web sites, but for most beginners, the fact that the tool was called Internet Explorer meant it was obvious that "The Internet" was the thing they were browsing.

  • I was a fresh-outta-college CS major working at the then-aerospace behemoth Hughes Aircraft Company. We had been connected to Usenet mail and newsgroups using the very highfalutin' and expensive Telebit Trailblazer modem, one of the first 9600 BPS modems to hit the market.

    The first evidence I can find of my former self is at the Telecom Digest archives [mit.edu], on a thread about phone repair service in the September 9, 1991 digest. I'm quite certain I was active on that list prior to our office's conversion to Inte

  • Yahoo (Score:2)

    by gatzke ( 2977 )

    I remember a buddy showing me "this cool yahoo thing" on Mosaic my senior year at GT. I think it was hosted out of a home directory rather than a proper URL.

    Before that, we were lucky to have "fast" 9600 baud modems in the dorms. Get off of my lawn!

  • The news spread pretty quickly at my university in Chicago, where I was working in 91. Having used archie and gopher we immediately recognized the potential. Yeah, Cern's www line mode browser with its numbered link interface wasn't much. We knew that would change. What mattered was the protocol. For me UK's lynx provided the first fast curses interface. We started gathering and providing lots of academic info really quickly. Watching think tank and academic info growth explode exponentially was a gr

  • ... I saw the web for the first time at a public computer while researching our garden simulator. I was not impressed. Back then I had used Hypercard and Smalltalk, and it just seemed like we could do a whole lot better, and I had been thinkign about how to do that. I still feel that way a bit, alhough obviously the linking idea has worked well, HTML and http had broad powers in their simplicity, even with links not being first class objects and virtual machines not being standardized, and so on. So, first

  • I can definitely recall running NCSA Mosaic 2.0, but I'm a bit dim whether I cut my teeth on an earlier Mosaic. A year or two before this, I had managed to obtain internet access when I lived in Toronto in the first week available on a provider called io.org where I mostly used the shell account on a system called r-node. Wikipedia says Internex Online was the first consumer dial-up ISP in Canada. Lots of people I knew had access to the internet through university dial-up accounts, back when September ca

    • Because I agree it would be so much better if the scientific calculation program I give you computes different results for you than it does for me.
      Definitely better.
      So much better than having to fix some broken implementations of a standard in the next rev.

  • I remember it like I remember the other two events. It's odd, as I was pretty dismissive of it, but it was in the front office of Bldg 5 at GSFC, and a secretary was showing it to me (yes, at NASA, back then, even the secretaries were geek-cool).

    All these threads bring back memories of that time (Trumpet Winsock, Gopher, etc...) which was just after I got out of college. Cool stuff, indeed.

  • Oh, yeah - I remember hearing him complain about the lousy click-through rate on his Google ads...

  • I didn't discover the web until 94 but I have fond memories of going to yahoo and skiimming through all the new websites on the Internet each week.

    When I look back at my predictions from those early years, I was right about predicting the emergence of services like ebay, wikipedia, online newspapers and how the web would eventually supplant tv as the number one medium for wasting time.

    I imaged social networking would be a bit like slashdot but that everyone would have their own personal webservers and that

  • Freshman year in college. Our dorm rooms were wired with 10Mb ethernet and pathworks.
    We had accounts on a couple of VMS boxes that were exposed to internet using a couple of T1 lines.
    Don't remember the first graphical browser I used.

  • First of all... Happy birthday, World Wide Web! [youtube.com] (and no, it is neither a Rickroll nor a goatse.)

    Now, my first memories of the Web was shortly after Prairienet in the Champaign-Urbana area went public through the library. That would be either 1993 or 1994. I first had to go to the library to connect because my computer at the time (Apple IIGS) had both a malfunctioning keyboard and monitor. Eventually it got fixed and I could then explore the deep dark depths of the Internet from the comfort of home. I

  • A group of us interested in computers went to the District office or whatever, where they had some computers connected to the web. (Mosaic was the browser of course) I didn't understand much at the time (didn't have a computer yet) but I asked a friend why the pages loaded slow (it was a 384k connection) My friend, used to 14.4 Dial up said "dude, you have no idea how fast this is". The next year when I finally got a computer, I realized how nice that 384k was. It would be 8 years before I used a connection

  • The Puget Sound area amateur radio operators had a tcp/ip network using the 2-meter ham bands and I put my Zeneth Z-100 laptop on it. I remember camping on San Juan Island with a ham group in 1989 and demonstrating how I could telnet from our campground into the Z-100 using a little Radio Shack hand-held computer. I couldn't do much of anything useful but it was very impressive.

    In about 1993 we had moved to a farm in central WA state and Internet access was available but was long distance until a Wenatchee

  • I was taught BASIC in graduate school in the mid seventies where we used the CDC used by Bill Gates as a teenager. It used punched cards and the "programmers" (who were just clerks) wore white lab coats as they took our cards from us. A day or so later we got our green bar paper back along with our card decks. People drew crazy designs on the end of the decks so they could find them more easily. It took three or four pages of green bar to provide the answer, which was normally something as complex as: 42. S

  • I first got on the Internet using an old 286 with a 2400 baud modem, using the freenet in Ottawa. For bonus geek points, at the time I was the head doorman at a bar called Zaphod Beeblebrox.

  • We think of the WWW as being an OK thing these days, only because of years of hard-fought experience. Think of Geocities pages with wild-ass layouts. But back in the early days, imagine your bank, e-commerce sites, university sites, government sites, search engines, etc., all looked like they were put together by a child, and looked like Geocities.

    HTML has no standard layout. It's completely random. Whatever the hell you want to do. Whatever technologies you want to throw in. It took two decades for e

  • Well... sorta. A friend of mine had an acoustic coupling for his Atari. He demonstrated it by dialing various computers, one of which was (probably) a Sun Micro at NASA's JPL. I wanna say this was about 1987. I thought *that* was cool, but I didn't really grasp the big concept, unfortunately.

    When 1994 came, I saw it again. Unfortunately I didn't have a computer, as I couldn't afford one (I was lucky if I could eat more than once a day, at the time), but I knew I had to participate. It took me until

  • My first experience with the web was in 1994 at sherbrooke u, my mon was working there and she had access to a 486dx4 100 equipped with nsca mosaic and trumpet winsock.

    My first search was on yahoo, I search for the Mona Lisa and I found tits. My mom was outraged but I was delighted. I then persuaded her to allow my to on the web and find the real Louvre picture. Next years, after 9 month of begging I received as a gift 60hr of INTERNET by month, my only restriction was no child porn and no bestiality, I nev

  • "There's something devilishly simple about the web on a theoretical level: create a network of wires, put a terminal in every home and business, and share information on top of it."

    Mmm, I'm pretty sure this is called "The Internet". Also I'm not sure how Napster and AudioGalaxy related to the Web, given they used proprietary protocols.
    As the Wired article stats, the terms "Web" and "Internet" are now considered pretty much synonymous by the general public. And lazy journalists.

  • A friend of mine showed me Mosaic with a web page open. I took a look at it and said "That'll never catch on" and went back to typing into my FTP session. It was at the computer lab of Tomball community college in Tomball, TX. I was busy searching for Warez at the time if I recall correctly and couldn't be bothered.

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