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."

Re:Well, you can still see it.

[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.

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.

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]

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: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: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: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.