CERN Celebrates 30 Years Since Releasing the Web To the Public Domain

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Sunday celebrated the 30th anniversary of releasing the World Wide Web into the public domain. From a report: As the World Wide Web Consortium's brief history of the web explains, in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee - then a fellow at CERN - proposed that the organization adopt "a global hypertext system." His first name for the project was "Mesh." And as the Consortium records, in 1990 Berners-Lee set to work on "a hypertext GUI browser+editor using the NeXTStep development environment. He makes up 'WorldWideWeb' as a name for the program." Berners-Lee's work gathered a very appreciative audience inside CERN, and soon started to attract attention elsewhere. By January 1993, the world had around 50 HTTP servers. The following month, the first graphical browser -- Marc Andreessen's Mosaic -- appeared. Alternative hypertext tools, like Gopher, started to lose their luster. On April 30, 1993, CERN signed off on a decision that the World Wide Web -- a client, server, and library of code created under its roof -- belonged to humanity (the letter was duly stamped on May 3).

Re:

[pecosdave]

DUH!

Of course not.

Everyone knows it was Al Gore!

Re:

[garyisabusyguy]

Al Gore is a former US Senator who served as the Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. In the 1980s and 1990s, he promoted legislation that funded an expansion of the ARPANET, allowing greater public access, and helping to develop the Internet. [wikipedia.org]

which is a far cry from inventing the internet, but sure helped form the government side to make it accessible

Everybody know this, unless you are just some stupid troll

Re:

[rbrander]

Yeah, the people of Iraq think that it's hilarious that Gore misquotes and distortions by some of the largest media, got them a whole pointless war that killed a million people.
https://www.vanityfair.com/new... [vanityfair.com]

Re:Apple hasn't claimed they invented it yet?

[narcc]

The web is not the internet.

Also, Al Gore never actually claimed to have invented the internet. The actual quote was "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" which is a perfectly fair claim, given the leadership role he played through the 80's and 90's. Al Gore deserves a lot of credit for his role in the creation of the internet.

He had long pushed for a high-speed national information network, long before many could see the value. Remember the term "information superhighway"? That was Gore. That or a similar term (I remember hearing the term 'data superhighways' as well) he very often compared the need for a national high-speed data network to the interstate highway system.

But, you know, 25-year-old jokes are funny, right?

Re:

[spaceman375]

I will. In 1988 I actually DID write a program that displayed documents and included highlighted links that you could tab to (pre-gui days) and then follow to another document. My boss loved it, and took all the credit when showing the customer. If only I'd been at CERN instead of a dinky software shop in New Jersey.

For perspective, my next project was software for running a video store. As in VCR tapes.

Re:

[Stormwatch]

You joke, but consider: the web was developed on Nextstep, which is the basis of modern macOS. So, in a very roundabout way, the Mac is part of that legacy.

Re: Apple hasn't claimed they invented it yet?

[dwater]

Same for Linux and Windows, in a very round about way?

Re:

[Stormwatch]

I don't know about that. What connection do you see among them?

AppleTalk

[Roger W Moore]

I was a grad student at CERN at the time and, if anything, Apple slowed the development of the web and just about everything else thanks to AppleTalk. The CERN network was configured so that all Macs on it could see each other. Around 1993/4 it achieved criticality where there were enough Macs that when a new one was added (or an existing one rebooted) and pinged the network the storm of all the stupid things announcing their existence to each other killed the network for several minutes. The network guys from CN division just loved the Mac users...

Re:

[Carewolf]

Yes, leading to the invention of Mac hunting teams in universities across the world, that would hunt down any mac users and forcefully disconnect them. They were not allowed on local area networks.

Also the critical mass was about 16 Mac users. The overhead scalled quadratically.

Re:

[Roger W Moore]

Also the critical mass was about 16 Mac users.

At the time CERN had a lot more than 16 machines on the network. Our experiment even used some for some of its monitoring but the things were so slow they all had accelerator boards that we were all somewhat flakey leading to one of my colleagues suggesting that a better way to accelerate a Mac was at 9.8 m/s^2 from a tall building.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

ISTR that either CAP or netatalk (I think the latter) had an Appletalk routing daemon by then, which could be used to segment Appletalk networks but still allow communications across... I used to use netatalk at circus.com (see the archive obvs) to support the mac users, who were half the household.

And yet Chrome is still threatening a monopoly

[xack]

Despite the once openness of the web, Google is trying to make the web Chrome based even more than Microsoft tried with IE. Once Chrome gets Apple to drop Webkit and then stop funding Firefox then the web will become a DRM platform. I predict it will happen by 2025. Google already got Opera and Internet Explorer/Edge killed, and Google compatibility is the number once source of bugs in Firefox (read bugzilla sometime). Enjoy ublock while you can.

Re:

[Tablizer]

> Once Chrome gets Apple to drop Webkit...

Apple won't do it without some kind of trade, because they know it keeps Google semi-tamed. What do you think they would trade?

Re:

[Waccoon]

Yeah, but web developers are also a major part of the problem. They immediately implement all these stupid Google features without a second thought, even when they know it will break everything else.

I remember when devs were screaming about standards compliance and graceful degradation. Once IE was dead, nobody gave a damn anymore.

I quit web development for a reason. It was too depressing. I work on emulators these days, and we sure do need more of them.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

What's the solution though? Mozilla don't seem to be capable of reversing Firefox's fortunes. Ban Chrome? Force Google to spin it off into a separate company? Force all the Chrome skin browsers to use something else?

Re:

[kackle]

Web browsers are ridiculously complicated. Maintaining that complexity requires much labor (because no one can just say that "it's finished" and leave it alone). Much labor requires much money. Much money means fewer organizations can do so, and they're going to want a return on their large investment. So there's always going to be someone wanting to steer the web ship (ironic, because one of Netscape Navigator's logos was a ship steering wheel/helm).

I know single-page apps are all the rage and mor

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Mozilla don't seem to be capable of reversing Firefox's fortunes.

Not interested, you mean. We keep telling them what we want, they keep not giving it to us, then they keep expecting us to install it on people's computers, advocate for it, etc. There's a massive disconnect between the Mozilla foundation, and Firefox users.

Well... that's nice and all

[willoughby]

That World Wide Web thingy might be nice and of interest to some people but my favorite thing to come out of CERN was Scientific Linux. Running an operating system from CERN on your computer was one of those ultra-geek coolish things which no-one understood but you.

Ahhh... the memories of the weird looks I'd get from people. Well... still do, for that matter. But for other reasons.

Anyway...

LHC

[Ogive17]

Here I was thinking the LHC at CERN would create a blackhole and end this planet. However they had a more devious plan. Release the World Wide Web and let civilization slowly unravel as idiots began banding together to make increasingly stupid decisions.

CEEERRRRNNNNNN!!!! (in my best Kirk voice)

Watching the Web be born was a trip... and now?

[Seven Spirals]

I was on the Internet long before someone decided to hybridize networking and HyperCard [wikipedia.org] at CERN. I was happy using GOPHER, ARCHIE, FTP, e-mail, and good old IRC (or ICB at the time). When the web hit the scene it was really an amazing experience that everyone immediately new was "big" and "important". It gave you a sort of evangelical enthusiasm to show other people and wow them, too. It interested folks who had no zeal for technology because the web connected you to people and topics you were interested in

Re:

[Gim Tom]

Thanks, you said it well. I remember GOPHER, ARCHIE, AND VERONICA on a green text only screen. Seems like all good things have to end someday.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Thank you for reminding me about VERONICA. It was the best GOPHER search engine at the time! I remember scrounging up Wyse 99GT terminals retired from the college administration building to build a lab on a serial MUX with them. We had like 16 of them running of one old Sun box and a serial concentrator. Everyone was using the text based Internet in there as well as some cool editors and other available tools. The lab stuck around a long time and eventually even had 'lynx' available for the web, too. I don

Speaking of Mesh

[drinkypoo]

Maybe an actual mesh project could be his next project. Because the web is a lost cause now, but we still need to fix this disaster communications problem.

When we just had earthquakes in Humboldt recently Verizon went out because they had inadequate battery backup and couldn't be arsed to bring a generator which, by the way, they had "promised" to do. But as you know, a promise from a corporation without consequences for failure isn't worth the breath that goes into the lie.

That wasn't even the biggest quake I've been in. I lived in Santa Cruz in '89, so I was there for the Loma Prieta quake. In that one, many of the land lines went out too, as poles came down and severed communications links. Not to mention the power was out for three days, which exceeds many CO's batteries' ability to power the network anyway.