The World's First Website Went Online 25 Years Ago Today

Megalith

Megalith

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History was made on August 6, 1991, when the world’s first web page was launched using a NeXT computer at CERN's headquarters in Geneva. The infrastructure for the web was built about a year before, which included core technologies such as HTTP and HTML.

On this day 25 years ago the world's first website went live to the public. The site, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was a basic text page with hyperlinked words that connected to other pages. Berners-Lee used the public launch to outline his plan for the service, which would come to dominate life in the twenty-first century. "The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system," said Berners-Lee on the world's first public website. "The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone."
 
"And on the second day, all hell broke loose..."

I remember those days quite well being as I've been "online" since the late 1970s, it's been a long road to get where we're at now and a lot of work to make it happen. Unfortunately, just like in those days when "the Internet" as it exists today (gleaned from the World Wide Web which just wasn't for a pretty long period of time), the sheer amount of content back then in 1991 pretty much matches the percentage of actual content available today, just a mere few points compared to the vastness of it all.

At one point in time the mantra for the burgeoning Internet was "content is king..." but that hasn't been true for oh, the past 10 years it seems. Nowadays it's just ads ads ads and social media bullshit which saddens me but that's what happens when you put humans in charge of perhaps the most widespread tool in use today compared to how landline phone service and TVs were in the mid-20th century.
 
I didn't get online until 1993 and back then I used an Internet portal via a BBS so used all unix tools they provided to do email, read the web, file transfer etc. Then one day someone told me about PPP and said I can view web pages with photographs in them, etc. I said, what do I need that for? I was perfectly fine at the time with just pure text. If I wanted porn I used Usenet and uue to convert the data into a viewable image. Fun times.
 
Shortly after all the cat freaks started posting pics.
 
pxc said:
It seems like longer ago. :p
Click to expand...

That's what I was thinking, although I may be getting the World Wide Web confused with my first forays into being online. Back in '83 I was lucky enough to have a wealthy step-father who wanted to keep me busy (and out of the way) so he bought me a KayPro II http://www.oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html , a 300 baud modem and a CompuServe account (at five bucks an hour). Not exactly the Web as we know it but still online, and learning at an early age how to get my ass handed to me in MUD's :p.
 
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