The World's First Web Site Celebrates 25 Years Online (info.cern.ch) 136
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN:
Twenty-five years ago, the first public website went live. It was a helpful guide to this new thing called the World Wide Web. The minimalist design featured black text with blue links on a white background. It's still online today if you'd like to click around and check out the frequently asked questions or geek out over the technical protocols.
Its original URL was info.cern.ch, where CERN is now also offering a line-mode browser simulator and more information about the birth of the web. CNN is also hosting screenshots of nine web "pioneers", including the Darwin Awards site, the original Yahoo, and the San Francisco FogCam, which claims to be the oldest webcam still in operation.
What are some of the first web sites that you remember reading? (Any greybeards remember when the Internet Movie Database was just a Usenet newsgroup where readers collaborated on a giant home-made list of movie credits?)
Its original URL was info.cern.ch, where CERN is now also offering a line-mode browser simulator and more information about the birth of the web. CNN is also hosting screenshots of nine web "pioneers", including the Darwin Awards site, the original Yahoo, and the San Francisco FogCam, which claims to be the oldest webcam still in operation.
What are some of the first web sites that you remember reading? (Any greybeards remember when the Internet Movie Database was just a Usenet newsgroup where readers collaborated on a giant home-made list of movie credits?)
And no slashdot effect? (Score:2)
Well prepared, well prepared.
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I've been talking to people, really smart people, the best people and they all say CERN has a great internet connection. They tell me CERN's internet is the best, it's really great, that's why we're going to take over this CERN place. And I'm going to get Bill Gates and Vladimir Putin to figure out how to use CERN to win an election.
Re:And no slashdot effect? (Score:4, Informative)
Well prepared, well prepared.
No preparation needed, it just has no baggage. It's a long time since I saw a page load so fast.
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Remember how different this looked in 800x600, without antialiasing of text, abominable Times New Roman, heavy link underlining, and a mid-grey colour as the browser default, inherited from development on TBL's NeXT?
Or the MacOS 7 black and white...
You really need an old computer, to truly appreciate the experience of this old page.
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What!?
No Mac II or an Orchid ProDesigner for VESA Local Bus?!
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I hate websites where the elements keep squirming around. I click a spot and nothing happens. Then the objects shift over and the page takes a click on the thing that wasn't there when I clicked.
Toll please, consumer (Score:2, Insightful)
If that page was made today, it would be spread out over 5 pages, have 32 trackers and self playing ads with sound.
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It'll also be 3-12MB for no discernible reason.
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Non-commercial web pages are still being made. It's just that the commercial web naturally has all the marketing dollars to become popular.
Re:Toll please, consumer (Score:4, Interesting)
In the very very early days of my UK ISP I had to ask the US NSF for permission to send 'commercial' packets across the Internet core routers!
Sadly I have lost their (paper) letter granting me that permission.
Rgds
Damon
Oblig: http://www.exnet.com/springboa... [exnet.com]
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To be fair, in 1991 there was no commercial web. Some commercial entities were allowed to connect to the internet as early as 1989, but full commercial internet didn't start until 1995.
I remember using the WWW in 1991 or 1992 before dropping out of school for a while and thinking how inferior the technology was to gopher (everything was text like in the example page). The browser I used was something cobbled together by some students and was more like a shitty version of lynx (all text based because
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If that page was made today, it would be spread out over 5 pages, have 32 trackers and self playing ads with sound
Or else be one of the top-trafficked and most influential sites currently online in the US [drudgereport.com].
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Which was immediately followed by the direction that it should NEVER be used.
Re: I remember (Score:1)
Is Blinky Bill ok to use
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I remember Lycos. It looked like a search engine but nearly always it returned something other than what you wanted.
Altavista and HotBot worked decently though. The main problem with Altavista was when people started doing heavy SEO and it broke the search results. Not to mention the paid results page you had to click through in order to get to the results you actually wanted. When Altavista started it had none of those issues.
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Hamster Dance
And the Goatse Pancake Bunny Dance [archive.org]. (analse.cx; now gone, but preserved by the Wayback Machine.)
First cool site was 'the liquid oxygen barbecue' (Score:3)
There was a massive fireball -- and a huge rush of adrenaline. I was always kind of sad that they didn't find some way to keep the original web page on the internet forever...
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I have ADD now, so gave up after that. Thanks. I remember watching it on my DECstation with 21" color monitor.
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Besides the LOX demo and his invention of Refrigerant R-406A "AutoFrost", George was an Alpha Hardware Hacker at Purdue who presented at Usenix conferences. He got a grant to work on multiprocessing, and so he took two VAX 780's, and connected them by the backplane, creating a multiprocessor VAX. Digital Equipment liked it so much that they made a product of it, called the VAX/782. The CPU clock was 5 MHz and there were a lot of DIP-package digital logic ICs in there, with lots of space between them on the
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What is this 'web' you refer to? Is it part of SnapChat?
Re: Web Crawler (Score:2)
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I remember using Dr. WebSpider on Caldera DR-DOS (now SCO) was probably my first browser. Also a pretty good TCP/IP stack for the day, wasn't vulnerable to ping of death.
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My own ISP site! (Score:3)
Well, I ran one of the first UK ISPs, and here is our fossil 'start' page for users:
http://www.exnet.com/springboa... [exnet.com]
Most of the links and graphics have now died!
But this was '95-ish and at uni some years earlier we had Mosaic and some very limited live access to the outside world, including isolated protocols such as FTP (ic.ac.uk was good) and Gopher... But Altavista in '95 really made a difference.
Rgds
Damon
Re: My own ISP site! (Score:2)
Thanks for this!
Who were the other early ISPs in the UK? I remember UUNET, Zynet, Demon -- something called The Free Net, too?
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IBMPCUG (IBM PC User Group) was one I liked.
I set up because I did not like the UKNet / Pipex duopoly that didn't seem to be to have even heard of customer service, and IIRC liked to claim copyright in all materials (eg USENET) that was routed via them... %-P
I imported and supplied Demon's first DNS server, a second-hand Sun workstation. I still remember carrying into their office and setting it up on a table for them. Cliff S was there I'm fairly sure...
Rgds
Damon
What, no goat.se? (Score:2)
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I trust that there are still plenty of mirrors available. I also trust you can find them if you are so inclined. Please forgive me if I'm too, umm... lazy to do that for you.
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Yeah... "Don't click this link!" and hundreds of windows opened or however many MacOS could handle (probably not many) before crashing and burning. I sometimes still wake screaming "Noooooo! Don't click that link!!!!"
Summary is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
The minimalist design featured black text with blue links on a white background.
The pages uses the default background, text and link color.
Those are white, black and blue in many browsers but by no means all.
If you set one of them, make sure you set all of them, otherwise your text or links could end up the same as the background color and become unreadable.
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The minimalist design featured black text with blue links on a white background.
Those are white, black and blue in many browsers but by no means all.
Many browsers?? I only remember the one. The many came later. Notice the tense: featured.
A reminder that the web was created (Score:4, Insightful)
to allow citizens to share information for the greater public good. It was not created as a means for private profit or spying on its users.
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Well there is still wikipedia, and people have the choice every day between volunteer created ad free openstreetmap and commercial google maps, created by people on their day job (and some few contributors who work for google for free).
This little gaming news website... (Score:3)
Blue's News back in the day. I haven't read it in years. Still around.
https://www.bluesnews.com/ [bluesnews.com]
Classic Steve Jobs and the Nascent Web (Score:5, Interesting)
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a lot of us missed this boat. "it is just a fad for hard core nerds.. no one in the real world will ever care"
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Exhibit A (Score:2)
in the case for net neutrality.
Good times. (Score:2)
NCSA Mosaic and the coffee pot with the camera on it.
My ISP - Ozemail - had a reasonably good home page. All the shareware archives were great - Simtelnet. AARNet for me (the Australia Academic and Research Network) - they held good mirrors of shareware sites.
A lot of tiny little user pages linked via webrings, although that was a little bit later.
Searching sucked. Google really cleaned up that space.
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I used to be a big fan of Altavista, and as I was running UUCP nodes for mail and USENET ('exnet', 'exnet2') of the mapping project run by the same guy.
I also remember when some new company started jamming up all my HTTP server capacity (and my horribly expensive 64kpbs line to London Docklands for international live IP connectivity) presumably trying to overcome 'latency'. A little company beginning with 'G'. I sent a nice note to their engineers suggesting that they be a little more careful in their spi
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"Searching sucked. Google really cleaned up that space"
I was working Internet tech support back then and was one of the 1st on the team to discover Google, which was probably thanks to Slashdot as I was reading it regularly for more than a year before signing up.
It was shocking how much quicker it was than any established search engine, even AltaVista which used to keep so much cached in RAM.
But the real advantage was that the truly relevant pages where almost always at the top of the list and you never had
US Information Sources on Paul Bernardo Killings (Score:3)
This will clearly label me as Canadian, but in the run up to the trial, the judge put a gag order on information in order to provide a jury pool that hadn't formed opinions based on news reports of the rather sensational kidnapping and murders of two teenage girls as well as then uncommon knowledge that Mr. Bernardo was thought to be the "Scarborough Rapist" who was the subject of a manhunt in Toronto in the 1980s.
The news reports and other information about Paul Bernardo and his wife Karla could only be found on sites located outside of Canada and was one of the first examples of how the Interwebs would bypass and subvert laws.
When it was like a small club (Score:2)
By the way, notice the quote: "Imagine if all newspapers became Internet service providers, now that would change the media landscape for sure," Daniels quipped.
Today, I am obliged to send Comcast $150 bucks a month, but I am reluctant to send the local newspaper a few bucks a month for access. What if the local paper had the wisdom in 1990 to become an ISP and wire the city w
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When I discovered the internet in 1993 there was Yanoff's list. http://www.cryan.com/yanoff.php [cryan.com]
I would go through then entries one by one (mostly ftp sites) trying to find interesting stuff.
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It was still possible in 1994 to visit all the sites starting with www. !!!
My favorites were Sun's guide to building sites and the Yale medical school style guide.
My first site in 1995 got over a million visitors. We did a Cannes film festival site and the URL was on the big screen at the Tokyo central railway station, the one you see on TV all the time. Unfortunately it is lost forever, the Japanese ISP went broke in 2005 or about then.
Fast page loading! (Score:2)
So fast.
So clean.
So awesome.
So Doge.
My Back door to the Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1994, BBSs were still the dominant experience for the common man. However, the University had a dial-up line that was configured to use a Gopher client as shell, for purposes of searching an online card catalog for one of the libraries. I found I could use the search engines of the day, Archie and Jughead (and Veronica?) to find hosts offering free access to Lynx (the text-only browser) and even Telnet "gateways". Cyberspace.com was offering free trial Unix accounts, literally with no verification. They offered Pine, storage space and plenty of other things. I could now surf the whole existing web, Gopherspace, read Usenet and download files and warez from there. Since Zmodem was borked by the Gopher client I was connected through, I couldn't download directly. So, I used Pine to re-mail them to myself at a local BBS which had a nightly UUCP connection where it exchanged email (with bangs as well as @) and updated it's select Usenet posts.
At one point, I struggled to run DOSSLIP and DOSLYNX directly on my PC, but this never compared to just using a BBS dialup program and doing things on the terminal. I still use Lynx and (Al)Pine several times a week!
Another Lynx trick came in handy 5 years later: You could telnet to password.io.com from anywhere in the world, and log on as guest. Lynx was configured as the shell, and you would then be presented with the minimalist web-based customer tools found at http://password.io.com/ [io.com] to reset your password, update your address, etc. IO forgot to disable browsing the filesystem (press g, period, enter). Also, IO never enforced uniform /home/user/ directory permissions or audited active accounts. As a result, through 2004, when IO was taken over by Prismnet (or later), you could roam around and directly view many customer's private files, email, and IO's sensitive system areas. This was a direct back-door into everything! That was a full two years after IOCOM "hardened" their network to sell network security services.
The Illuminati Online website is archived by an old employee here: http://io.fondoo.net/ [fondoo.net]
Re:My Back door to the Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you me?
I remember it being cyberspace.org, not .com. I also recall that it wasn't a trial at all, but that it survived on kick-backs from the local telco for connection fees from long-distance callers. The phone bills - those are things my parents will never forget. Likewise on the MS-DOS based SLIP connections: It sure seemed like it ought to be better, but packetization delays with TCP/IP over a 14.4k modem made it fairly hellish compared to just using a Telemate for a terminal emulator.
Around the same time I was also using a borrowed, freebie alumni account on the local University's VAX, with almost no storage quota. It was nice, but their modems were only 9600bps, backed by a 56k leased line to Sprint.
Later on, I discovered io.com and their 10 megabyte disk quota (with lots more, temporarily, for free if you asked nice) seemed dreamy in comparison. This lead to IRC and a decent Usenet feed, which lead to a lost childhood. 9600 became kind of slow for this use, but Delphi provided just enough Unix-y stuff to get to an io.com shell reliably at somewhat higher speeds. (I still hate web-based forums and long for the simplicity of tin, even though tin itself was considered ridiculously featureful at the time.)
Security was lax, but people (everywhere) made the Internet a much friendlier and trusting place than it is in today's secure-by-default, impossible-to-share-anything mentality (which isn't really any better). It wasn't long after I discovered that /home/* wasn't locked down at all, that I also discovered how to keep some of my own files to myself.
I also liked io.com's announcements, where jrcloose and company would rant, often in some depth, about whatever nefarious technical struggle they were solving today, and Steve Jackson himself would sometimes write about...whatever the fuck Steve wanted to write about. I learned a lot from those pages (though I can't call them blogs, because blogs weren't a thing yet).
Muscle memory still requires me to type "ping io.com" when checking a system for DNS and IP connectivity.
Ah, the freewheeling days of yore, where building a mail server just meant setting up Sendmail, some manner of POP3 and IMAP access, sorting out the MX record, and just leaving port 25 open for all and sundry to use -- because there was just no need to do anything more restrictive at the time.
And the Corel NetWinder, where everyone was sure that ARM was the future -- 18 years ago. http://www.netwinder.org/about... [netwinder.org]
Are we there yet?
Oh. Right: Back on topic, I was a kid then. Getting this shit working in useful (and/or interesting) ways required problem-solving skills, which are processes that are now indelibly burned into my brain's wiring.
These days, I can troubleshoot just about anything.
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..Security was lax, but people (everywhere) made the Internet a much friendlier and trusting place than it is in today's secure-by-default, impossible-to-share-anything mentality (which isn't really any better).
This is a thing that a lot of the younger audience won't understand, there were known security holes in a lot of the systems but we didn't really care as no-one abused them.
As an example, from around mid-late '93 to Dec 1997 I allowed anyone who could drive a ftp client to upload pages anonymously to a 'public' section of my web server here in the UK, there were all sorts of things there from early Java programmers, Texan Bands, Digital artists, Fan clubs, people just playing with html..the only rule I h
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Hahah, I was dialed into a local number to the University's free Gopher-based card catalog, but I was telnetting to cyberspace.??? from there for my free 30-day trial shell account(s). Pretty sure it was .com. I don't even know where it was physically located. The domain's changed hands many times since then.
IO was a fun, sometimes strange place to work. When were you a customer? I worked there 2000-2001. Did you see the archival copy I linked to? Lots of interesting pictures, and you can even see the emplo
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Upon further thought, maybe they did have a plan for charging people money -- if they weren't getting monetary kickbacks from the phone company for a particular user.
Or maybe the plans really were 30 days. It's been a long, long time. It was a strange place and I sometimes saw discussions over what they were doing was legal or not.
I was an IO customer for probably 3 or 4 years, ending somewhere around 2000.
Malware Warning at CERN site (Score:2)
I started clicking around, and Google popped up a malware warning for the "Astrophysics Abstracts" link at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/... [info.cern.ch] .
Anyone know of a way to confirm or deny this warning, other than letting my computer get infected?
Jennicam (Score:3)
Jennicam!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
White background? (Score:2)
I don't see any background color specified in the markup, and I'm not even sure it was possible to do that at that time.
The first web page I saw, in one of Netscape's first version, was later, but I remember that Netscape found it cool to have a grayish background back then rather than a white one. I think Mosaic had a gray background too. What was the browser used to display that first web page? How did it look like?
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The first browsers, both Netscape and Mosaic had a grayish background.
By not specifying any colours you'd get #000 black text and an around #ccc gray background.
Namely... (Score:2)
Cello. Followed by Mosaic.
And yet HTML is still shit (Score:1)
* Instead of browsers generating errors about missing tags, they silently accept it. *facepalm* [google.com]
* Who was the idiot that thought case insensitivity for tags name was a good idea??
A) Browsers now have to accept twice as many tags.
e.g. & and & both generate ampersands. You can start with <BLOCKQUOTE> and end with </blockquote>, etc.
B) We dumb grave accent tags [psu.edu], like À for À and à for à which prevents browsers from converting all tags to either u
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> "Who was the idiot that thought case insensitivity for tags name was a good idea??" - everyone? reduces human error substantially
As someone who remembers the arguments about this, it _engenders_ human error.. Having to wade through inconsistent, case insensitive source code is an ongoing source of error in all source code, and an ongoing issue with html and mysql an dother case insensitive languages. It's not quite as bad as the confusion of mishandled "camel case" in arbitrarily long function names.
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I do apologize for the lack of clarity in my message, I forgot that it would be rendered as markup, so my comments were garbled.
Is an "HTML" tag closed by a "html" tag, a "hTML" tag, or any of the other 14 variants? Yes it is. Multiply the versions of every single tag or case insensitive filename, field, or label of any time and one faces a serious burden merging valid that follows a different style, ensuring that comments about tags are not themselves considered tags by accident, The need to regularize al
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To make your attempted point accurate, you'd actually have to say that they accepted an exponential number of tags 2^N where N is the length of the tag, e.g., "a" could be either "a" or "A", but "body" could be "bodY", "boDy", ..., "BODy", or "BODY".
Nobody does that in a real HTML parser: they simply translate the tag name either to all-lower or all-upper case and then do the comparison.
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The simply solution would be to make everything lower case like C.
No SHOUTING
No MiXeDcAsE.
So we've been upgraded? (Score:2)
This Internet thing ... is it some kind of upgrade of the Fidonet they didn't tell us about?
Enough stalling. I've been trying to recall exactly when I moved from BBS systems to Internet access at home, and it kind of runs together in my mind. I first got AT&T worldnet in 1995. There wasn't that much difference in content available between BBS in a large city and the internet, or at least for what I wanted to see. I downloaded slackware onto a bunch of floppies around 1995, but I think that was from a BB
The first search war between Yahoo! and AltaVista (Score:4, Insightful)
IMDB etc. (Score:2)
Aahh. and look how fast that page loads, devoid of all the needless crap we pile on now.
I don't have a grey beard (it wasn't THAT long ago and I was young) but I do remember downloading the entire IMDB as a file and parsing it with a reader. They would post periodic updates.
I was also the designer of the original set of icon buttons for web version of IMDB, which were made on my Amiga. Good times.
-Mike
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First site to perform a service. (Score:2)
My site, Interguru.com [archive.org] , set up in 1995, may well be the first site to use then then-new file upoad facility. It performed a service, translating email address books from one format to another, such as Eudora to Pine, rather than just displaying information.
Does anyone know of a earlier site that used file uploads?
The first Nike.com website (Score:1)
The Real First WebCam (Score:1)
Yanoff List (Score:2)
Was one of the first things I remember making it to the web, was Scott's list. Though technically the list was first posted to bulletin boards,ftp servers and yes, finger.
For the young ones, here is what the internet looked like in 1993 [cryan.com] The list itself was available by html in 1994, if not earlier
Copyright 1994 "http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~yanoff/yanoff.html" Scott Yanoff
And some background:
And a generation of crapware followed (Score:2)
To this day, websites don't render the same way on all browsers and it's damn near impossible to design a page the same way that you used to design things in a desktop publisher. In addition, there are still a legion of incompetent page designers who insist on making things only work properly on Internet Explorer.
Printing IMDB (Score:2)
Not only do I remember when IMDb was a Usenet created list, but I printed it out on my university's printers (the really old kind that had those perforated holes on the side of the printout) to show to people offline.
Lightspeed's (Score:1)
I was quite into modding windows 3.1 (and Widows NT 3.1 and 3.51as well) at the time (late 90s) and had it running really well, plus a few really rare releases of programs that normally would nerver have run on it. So I frequented these pages that dealt with that.
Oh, and Nathan's page with the flames and IE is Evil! Needless to say it was a well designed if basic site,,,
Still wasn't the first (Score:1)
We had web sites in the US way back into the 1980s. Xerox had hyperlinks, embeded into their docs. We also had internet news and archives on certain sites as well as gopher, etc. HTML is actually an American AIrforce invention, from the 1960s. So they're celebrating their version of the web. One copied from US sources. One built on top of all the US contributions.
Not modified since April 1996 (Score:1)
Kuroshin.org! (Score:2)
Oh yeah, Kuroshin.org and tons of alt.linux newsgroups in Usenet... Ah, and alt.religion.kibology!!!
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Talking of Cern, I used the graphics on their Snowboard and Ski Club web site to learn to Snowboard at the local dry ski slope some time in the mid 90's. Sadly they no longer offer this fine service but I have not seen anything better since.