Today marks the twentieth birthday of the world wide web project. The concept was invented by Physicist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at the CERN laboratories in Geneva, Switxerland, but the web wasn’t put into the public domain until April 30, 1993. It was this making the technology available and royalty-free, along with a code library and basic browser, that allowed the birth of the web as we know it.
So what did the first web page look like? Various snapshots of it have been preserved over the years, but CERN didn’t preserve the original URL (though it owns the NeXT server that originally hosted the site) — until now. Go here to visit a piece of internet history.
On a more personal level, do you remember the first website you visited? What about your first email address? Or IM handle?
I remember my first site – accidentally stumbled across a naughty repository someone had made on the network in my dad’s office. His job? Working for the U.S. Senate.
Your tax dollars at work, America.
Awesome, good job Tom, thank you for this. And I remember when the internet wasn’t just the WWW. I had to use different programs (non-browsers) to access FTP sites, and IRC was a big part of my day. Being able to chat with other friends (who were also computer nerds by necessity in this context). mIRC was my favorite IRC program, and I loved Netscape v2. Now I use Firefox, and whatever version it has automatically upgraded to.
Thanks again Tom.