The Web Is 16 Today

GuNgA-DiN writes, "Today marks the 16th anniversary of the World Wide Web. According to the timeline on the W3.org site: 'The first web page [was] http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Unfortunately CERN no longer supports the historical site. Note from this era too, the least recently modified web page we know of, last changed Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT (though the URI changed.)' A lot has happened in 16 years and this little 'baby' has grown into quite the teenager."

Confirmed?

[aedan]

Has Netcraft confirmed this?

Re:Confirmed?

[YA_Python_dev]

The URI changed, so it's not the oldest page on the net.

Well, the content is still the original one and (surprise!) is still almost 100% valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! I kid you not: try it for yourself [w3.org]!

The only missing thing is the DOCTYPE declaration, but everything else is just fine: call it a tribute to the incredible backward/forward/whatever compatibility and flexibility of HTML!

Re:

[Da_Weasel]

It definitely has nothing to do with the article. Must be an automated post, but what is the motive? Hmmmm.....?

Does this mean we get a John Water's movie?

[feyhunde]

And what state/country is the internet? Just wondering if she's legal.

Well, you can still see it.

[Umbrae]

You can still see a version of TheProject.html at

http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hyper text/WWW/TheProject.html [w3.org]

although I'm not certain how outdated it is, the 1992-11-03 seems to be encouraging.

I viewed source and it crashed Firefox!

[greenreaper]

I guess there are limits for compatibility . . . some of the stuff in there looked pretty experimental.

Re:

[greenreaper]

The reason turned out to be because I was running a trunk build, and every page crashed when viewing the source. But it was fun to think that it was this particular page for a while. :-)

Re:

[foobsr]

For the real historian:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.archives/msg/a 77343f9175b24c3?output=gplain [google.com]

There you have it all (and there is not much new yet :)

bang "gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!aplcen!uakari.primate.wis c.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu !math.lsa.umich.edu!emv " for the bucks ?)

a public domain version of Lisp

and, of course

"Don't forget to send in your license form. Enjoy."

CC.

Re:Well, you can still see it.

[Zeinfeld]

OK, who was the last person to surf the entire Web? By this I mean visit every site manually. I did that sometime in November 1992. Took me about 8 hours. At the time there were about 100 sites that were linked to the CERN list of sites.

Re:

[bcat24]

It is indeed an excellent definition list. I think if you added a doctype, changed to , and took it it would even validate.

PS: Who jumped at the sight of a nextid tag? This is some seriously old markup. Then again, the fact it stills displays on my 2006 browser is a tribute to the longevity of the Web, I guess.

Re:

[G-funk]

Then again, the fact it stills displays on my 2006 browser is a tribute to the longevity of the Web, I guess

Actually, I'd say the that the fact itself is notable is a tribute to the transitory nature of the Web. Nobody's surprised when they can read a 250 year old text.

Meh ... it will never take off

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

In 1993 on a University VAX my bet would of been Gopherspace. It had Archie and Veronica for godsake!!

Re:

[0racle]

There is no way putting Archie and Veronica together was going to result in anything that got anything done.

Re:

[gwyrdd benyw]

In 1993 on a University VAX my bet would of been Gopherspace

Yep, my friends will never let me forget my initial assessment of the web in 1993: "that's stupid." :) I was also a big fan of gopher (being a university student at the time as well).

Gopher is a good example of what happens

[HarryCaul]

When you try to control use and charge for standards.

WWW is a good example of what happens when you don't.

Re:

[bcat24]

They changed for Gopher?! I was a bit young back then, so I missed out on Gopherspace, but I've never heard that the spec cost money.

Re:

[Scarletdown]

All this time and you still can't spell "would HAVE". Would of? What the hell does that even mean?

I think it's pretty obvious that in this particular context, would of means would have.

Thanks Al Gore

[fit4130]

Thank you Al Gore. He's the most important man of the 21st century, hands down.

Re:

[cyber0ne]

He is a 10th level Vice President, after all.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

Al Gore invented the Internet, not the web. You'd have thought that on Slashdot people would know the difference...

Re:

[Penguin Programmer]

No, no, Al Gore invented the _internet_, not the _web_. There's a huge difference!

Re:BUT SNOPES SAYS!!!!!!11!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

... but.. credit WAS his. Al Gore was the first or surely among the first of the members of Congress to become a strong supporter of advanced networking while he served as Senator. As far back as 1986, he was holding hearings on this subject (supercomputing, fiber networks...) and asking about their promise and what could be done to realize them. It was clear that as a Senator and as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it.

Al Gore has played a powerful role in policy terms that has supported its continued growth and application, for which we should be thankful. As Vice President, he has been very responsive to recommendations made, for example, by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee that endorsed additional research funding for next generation fundamental research in software and related topics.

We're fortunate to have leaders like Al Gore who embrace new technology and have the vision to see how it can be put to work for national and global benefit.

In my opinion to not acknowledge the great benefits and give credit for intelligent leadership shown by polititions like Al Gore, leads to poor choices and bad decisions being played out for decades to come.

Give the man his due, thank him for pushing intelligent policy.

Quotes taken from http://web.archive.org/web/20000125065813/http://w ww.mids.org/mn/904/vcerf.html [archive.org] with modifications.

Re:

[HarryCaul]

Maybe so, maybe so.

But he's certainly not infallible on tech policy. He is, after all, Al "Clipper Chip" Gore, and for that I cannot forgive him.

In the greatest of ironies, it was John Ashcroft who led the fight against good ol skipjack.

Times do change...

Re:

[sreilly]

What does it mean to "create the internet"? Obviously TCP/IP existed before Al Gore came on the scene, but back then it was called the NSFnet (and ARPAnet before that) and only really became the "Internet" as we know it after it was opened up to the community at large and not just limited military/university access. Who was it that pushed for research money to be put into the NSFnet? Al Gore. Who was it that pushed the initiative in congress to open it up to the community at large? Al Gore.

Do yourself

Oh, My Gawd, Now You've Done It!

[darkonc]

You've just slashdotted the entire World Wide Web!

Teenager ? TEENAGER ?

[unity100]

GROWN ? Boy, if we are talking about the 'web', it is on the brink of ascending into supernatural dimensions, growth and 'lore' wise.

It has become a connection that binds us who are all over the world, it has become a revealer of truth that uncovers the hiddens in the doings of wrongdoers, it has become a place that chinese and canadian and namesoever teenagers come play in, it has become a place where we can find anything in, it is reshaping politics, nations, lives, even inner thoughts of people.

'It' is actually 'us'. We are the web.

Welcome to utopia being realized

Re:Teenager ? TEENAGER ?

[grouchomarxist]

I think you are correct in saying that "We are the web". It is true. The web is a reflection of humanity. In represents mankind, warts and all.

However, because of that I wouldn't want to call the web a utopia. It is a communications mechanism, but it can't fix our flaws, it reveals them.

Indeed !

[unity100]

Its also batman, accompanied by a half naked annoying teenager

Re:

[unity100]

from 1996 to 2006, down from $20.000 a month to $2 a month.

We are on a very fast trend. It will definitely not reach zero, but approach zero faster.

Remembering SGML

[RobertB-DC]

Back in the early '90s, I was working at American Airlines. Then as now, they were largely mainframe-oriented, though access was via PC emulation. A suggestion came across that we should look at this thing called SGML -- a way of digitizing our voluminous documentation so that it would be accessible from any platform. Mainframe, PC, Mac... anything.

I wasn't terribly impressed. Sure, it was cool to be able to add "hyper links" to other parts of the document, or to other documents, but the conversion process would be murder. And tables! What was all this TR TH TD mishmash, just to make a simple table?

My recommendation: Why doesn't everyone just use Microsoft Word format? It's available to everyone, and it's not like the internal format is going to change or anything!

Thank goodness I was working somewhere else by the time my first thoughts on SGML -- the precursor of HTML -- were proven to be utterly, completely Wrong.

Re:

[chris mazuc]

My recommendation: Why doesn't everyone just use Microsoft Word format? It's available to everyone, and it's not like the internal format is going to change or anything!

You're kidding, right?

Re:

[Teun]

Early nineties, Microsoft Word?

More likely WordStar or at best WordPerfect 5.

Re:

[daniel23]

WordStar was 1985 for me, and some versions to follow until late 80s. I wrote my M.A. in it from 85 to 86. There was another app coming around these days, with an ridiculous menu system but some strength in page layout and much better equipped to work with huge texts and laser printers, ms word. Got it in version 4 at the end of the 80s, did an 800p travelguide to China with it in 1991, probably version 5 then. This was all dos-land, of course. We installed Windows 3.0 in ~1992, winword 1 was laughable but

Re:

[GrahamCox]

Why doesn't everyone just use Microsoft Word format? It's available to everyone, and it's not like the internal format is going to change or anything

That wasn't true then, has never been true and never will be true.

Bah!

[NinePenny]

Back then, we used Gopher... And we liked it! These kids and their new fangled web thingy need to get off my lawn.

Re:

[Big Ryan]

...and writing our email using Pine, uphill and in the driving snow.

Remember the original grey background of webpages in Netscape 0.9?

Re:

[HarryCaul]

What was that software you could use to have multiple "pages" opened on your shell account? I remember using it to have "tabbed" browsing, of a sort.

Yeah, that's it!

[HarryCaul]

I don't have cause to use unix shells much these days. :-)

But screen was incredibly handy in the old days. I remember being quite excited the first time I discovered it.

Re:Bah!

[Amazing Quantum Man]

And we had to walk 15 miles to send that email!

Re:

[Dunbal]

And we had to walk 15 miles to send that email!

      You walked? Well at least you could walk. I mean, WE had to crawl, and it was at least 30 miles... we used to dream about being able to walk...

Re:

[metlin]

To our neighbors!.

Re:

[earthbound kid]

If you were using Gopher in 1990, you're a time traveller. The Web slightly predates Gopher, though obviously Gopher became popular before the Web did.

Informative!

[syousef]

I thought the least recently modified web page was actually my personal home page still held on my old University programmer's society account. Thanks for the clarification.

Wow

[hahafaha]

Hey, Nov. 13 is my birthday! (Happy birthday to me...) The WWW and I were born on the same day! Well, this explains a lot!

Re:

[pipingguy]

Mine is November 7; guess what I got as a gift.

Re:

[hahafaha]

Thanks! I don't quite understand how this is offtopic. Mod's, you suck!

Re:

[hahafaha]

Sorry, a mere typo. Give me a break, I was drunk (just kidding)!

My First Home Page

[On Lawn]

I still get a kick out of searching for "my first home page" to find old snapshots of early internet splendor.

don't forget the first photo ever on the web

[circletimessquare]

it was, appropriately enough for the web and its future as the pr0n superhighway, of scantily clad women [wikipedia.org]

My Super Sweet 16

[mattwarden]

Time for a little party [mtv.com]? Who's up for mortgaging their house to fund it?

First web page

[DaveM753]

I would have thought the first web page would have said "Under Construction".

Re:

[Teun]

I would have thought the first web page would have said "Under Construction".

You're damn right!
Including an animated gif!

Teenagers

[g00z]

A lot has happened in 16 years and this little 'baby' has grown into quite the teenager.

And like most teenagers, it's preoccupied with pornography.

Standards! Standards! Where are the standards!

[AdamKG]

Try running the W3C Validator [w3.org] on that woozy.

Sheesh. Some people have no respect for standards...

Re:Standards! Standards! Where are the standards!

[Zarel]

Oh, c'mon, it's an HTML document, not an XHTML document. Let's see how it does in the latest version of HTML [w3.org]... Oh, look, it validates.

Heh. Remember the huge debate over

[HarryCaul]

Commercializing the internet?

How'd that ever work out anyway?

Re:

[mccalli]

Commercializing the internet?

I do indeed. I remember working at a company which used the net for commercial purposes in about 1993. We formatted and transmitted journals to the IEEE, and used ftp to do it.

The whole thing had to be kept pretty quiet on both sides, as it was a near certainty that if the net-powers-that-be discovered we were using the internet for sordid commerce then there would probably be hell to pay and access to lose.

The web was something I seriously misjudged at first. I remembe

How much money has been spent...

[dantheman82]

over the Internet? Perhaps more than any other medium before it...?

Oldest server still serving

[frisket]

The longest-serving web server (the search engine behind the current celt.ucc.ie) was the 9th web server in the world and it's still sitting there, still serving the project it was bought for. Something of a two-edged sword: kudos to Sun for making a machine that has never crashed and never dropped a bit, and to Tim Bray for the PAT search engine which runs on it; but a victim of its own success in that it's only now being scheduled for replacement as the project moves from SGML to XML.

Re:Oldest server still serving

[radu.stanca]

The longest-serving web server (the search engine behind the current celt.ucc.ie) was the 9th web server in the world and it's still sitting there, still serving the project it was bought for. Something of a two-edged sword: kudos to Sun for making a machine that has never crashed and never dropped a bit, and to Tim Bray for the PAT search engine which runs on it; but a victim of its own success in that it's only now being scheduled for replacement as the project moves from SGML to XML.

Posting to Slashdot a link to to a web-server hosted on ~15 years old hardware? PRICELESS

Re:

[chochos]

OK but not all of it is old; it says it's running Apache 2.0.52 so at least the web server has been updated, although I suppose the most important part is all the SGML stuff that is going to be replaced with XML now.

Sweet 16!!!

[Scarletdown]

Happy sweet 16th birthday to the World Wide Web!

Now, who do we designate to take the obligatory birthday spanking?

Re:

[Scarletdown]

*** Ba-Doomp! ***

Al Gore invented it 16 years ago?

[filesiteguy]

I thought he brought it out in the '70s. Hmm!

Learn something new every day...

Re:Al Gore invented it 16 years ago?

[WilliamSChips]

The. Internet. Is. Not. The. World. Wide. Web.
Now write that on a board 50 million times.

Re:

[trwww]

perl -e "print join('. ', qw(The Internet Is Not The World Wide Web)) x 50_000_000"

Re:

[filesiteguy]

Yeah, yeah, I remember being on Gopher and WAIS back at school. I then remember some BBS having this Mosaic thingy, which I downloaded and seemed to work well. It reminded me of the Hypercard things I was doing a few years previous. Oh, and as for that client-side scripting....bah! :P

use strict

[overtly_demure]

#!/perl/bin -w
use strict;
use warnings;

my $i = 0;
while ($i++ < 50000000){print "The. Internet. Is. Not. The. World. Wide. Web.\n";}

16, eh?

[proxy318]

Two more years. I'd hit it.

Re:

[pipingguy]

Two more years. I'd hit it.

The age of consent (to vote)?

Re:

[vidarh]

16 is legal in most of the world, so you'd probably not be the first.

Better than Sweet 16...

[Jesterboy]

Call me when she's 21.

Then we'll have a par-tay, let me tell you!

Age

[Umbral Blot]

Realizing that I am a good deal older than the internet, and that a fair percentage of the readers of this article probably aren't, make me feel old. Get off my lawn.com you damned kids!

Re:

[Umbral Blot]

Just because I joined late doesn't make me young, it makes me not a true geek.

The web is 16???

[cgreuter]

So where's the web-controlled car?

DNF

[xPhoenix]

last changed Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT

I can't seem to find the URL anywhere, but I could have sworn that the page announcing plans for Duke Nukem Forever was at least a few days older...

Skynet / Internet ...

[slackarse]

The system goes on-line November 13th, 1990. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. The Internet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th 2010. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Re:Is she legal yet?

[Throtex]

Legal? I'm sure she could teach you a thing or two!

Everything I never wanted to know about sex I learned on the Internets. :P

Re:

[Kandenshi]

And a few things you didn't want to know I imagine =\

ewww @ tubgirl

Re:

[flewp]

Almost as sad as your failure at the concept of a joke?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you access her from Canada

Re:Is she legal yet?

[dysplay]

A lot has happened in 16 years and this little 'baby' has grown into quite the teenager.

And like most teenagers, has an over-abundant collection of porn.

Re:Is she legal yet?

[Kent Simon]

Don't bother man, everyone and their grandmother has been on her, and if you aren't careful you can catch a virus ;)

Re:Is she legal yet?

[plantman-the-womb-st]

One word. Fallopian.

Re:

[fireman sam]

Fallopian:

- A person who collects, or has intimate knowledge of the fallopia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallopia [wikipedia.org]
- A duality of tubes

Re:

[drinkypoo]

how would you do it with a series of tubes?

One word: fleshlight [fleshlight.com]. Of course, that's also only one tube, but it's a starting point...

Re:

[ibjhb]

I guess it is mirrored here:

http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hyper text/WWW/TheProject.html [w3.org]

Re:

[qzulla]

Cool! The first example of teh is here. [w3.org]

qz

Re:

[ZachPruckowski]

That's good. Now when my secretary sends me an Internets, it can drive a dumptruck through the tubes to my computer. That'll fix the clogged pipes problem.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

You know, that's the second time I've seen someone point that out on Slashdot in a week. It's amazing how much attention Slashdot seems to be paying to the legality of having sex with 16-year-old boys...

Re:

[bcat24]

Well, quite a few Slashdotters are 16, myself included (though I'm straight), so that could explain the interest in teen sex.

Who wasn't online in 87?

[HarryCaul]

I was back in '81. Heck, I spent the 80's flame warring on GEnie and CompuServe, and paying by the hour to do it!

And then there was FidoNet.

And everyone's own homebrewed BBS software.

87? 87 was for the latecomers.

Re:

[LunaticTippy]

Bah, genie & compuserve. I laughed about you posers on usenet, using my university dialup account. Of course, I had to pay for internet after I graduated and moved away. Everyone thought I was insane. Paying for internet?!? What's an internet!?!

Re:Who wasn't online in 87?

[HarryCaul]

My usenet access came through a state university where I had a friend of a friend who was an admin.

I might be mis-remembering, but I don't think I had usenet directly until my netcom account.

And then when AOL got usenet! Ah the screams of pain! But it turned out usenet was too complicated for the AOL masses and it didn't matter all that much anyway.

Now usenet is essentially the same small group of people it was 10 years ago. The same exact people, in fact.

So that's good.

 

Re:

[flewp]

I guess it makes me a youngin, but hearing "netcom" brings me back. I wasn't even a shell user, I was a puny ix'er.

Not offtopic, but shows misperceptions

[iamlucky13]

Then why have I been online since 1987?

People really should try to be more clear what they are talking about. The story submission isn't, and "internet" and "world wide web" are somewhat ambiguous terms.

Most of us know that distributed networking goes back to the 60's or so, with ARPAnet. In fact, according to wikipedia (I feel a slight tinge of irony looking these details up), our beloved TCP/IP began taking shape in the early 70's and ARPAnet began using TCP/IP in 1983. Meanwhile, services like Compuserve began offering private dial-up networks, and augmented them with email in 1979. Usenet popped up at the same time. The BBS's started popping up in short succession.

So all this was in place by 1990 when Tim coined the term world wide web and created the first browser, but it is the experience of browsing inter(hyper)linked files that defines most people's understanding of the internet. I suppose it's fitting to consider the start of this, if any one event, as the birth of the world wide web.

I'd really like to see a more general timeline, showing the major steps forward from the first electronic computers, first networked computers, ARPAnet, Compuserve et al, TCP/IP, DNS (did DNS already exist when CERN posted their first page?), etc...along with brief descriptions of how each came to be, and maybe some way of conveying how these technologies all converged to create the internet we have today. Most "histories" of the internet I've seen are pretty scattered and it's hard to get a grasp of how things really came together. The wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], for example, barely discusses DNS and the sections aren't really tied together into a "big picture" of the internet.

Re:

[gelfling]

No not really. We had primitive hyperlinking through Syracuse University's network back then. We were connecting to other universities in Japan, Switzerland and even the Soviet Union back then. Sure it was crude but we still had Archie, Gopher, Veronica and such. I'm not talking about Compuserve. But hey we can all make the wrong assumptions, can't we?

Re:

[TheSync]

I think the "History of the Internet" owes a heck of a lot to the companies that commercialized the Internet (e PSINet, UUNET, Netcom, Digex, etc.) They took a research network and expanded it into the pr0n-clogged metaverse we love today!

Most people....

[EmbeddedJanitor]

just see "the computer" and cannot tell the boundary between what is on their computer and what is on the www. To many/most people, the internet is just something you must plug in for some of your computer to work (ie. a bit like a power cord, but mysteriously different). I frequently get questions of the form "Do I need to connect to the internet to make my printer print in colour?"

Finer details like drivers, operating systems, internet vs www etc just cause many eyes to glaze over.

Re:

[zptao]

So what kind of Sweet 16 party are you going to have? Going to get a ferrari cake?