4 ms·

The world's first website went online 25 years ago today

31 points by acangiano 10y ago

sverige 10y ago
Exciting times. I remember trying the Mosaic browser for the first time and thinking that it was at least as good as Gopher, and maybe better. It was inconceivable to me at the time that it would become what it is now. Hell, the "blink" command seemed pretty cutting-edge when it was added to HTML (as a joke, it turns out). I never imagined it would become basically indispensable for conducting most business or that it would become the replacement for tv.
- jazoom 10y ago
  I never imagined it would become basically indispensable for conducting most business or that it would become the replacement for tv. I initially thought you were referring to the blink command.
colmvp 10y ago
That time will always have a place in my heart. An age where we were largely limited to a couple fonts, where Times New Roman was de facto, where hyperlinks were almost always blue with underlines, where quirky animated gifs were ubiquitous, where design and user experience was very raw and still undiscovered... it was indeed a simpler time!
doozy 10y ago
"By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers - of which 2000 were commercial - and 10 million users." That was the time I first gained internet access. So that puts me well within the first 1% of internet users. The web felt huge even then. But it was much slower, I still remember my 14.4 kbit/s modem.
- djKianoosh 10y ago
  same here, through my aunt's computer at her law offices. i was able to find neat websites from professors talking about all kinds of things and looking at the source html is how I learned it in the first place. good times
  - doozy 10y ago
    That's how we all learned. That, and I remember downloading Netscape 2.0 and finding an html tutorial in the help menu. I should start claiming 20+ years of web development experience. I also adopted their mail client, I've been using its successors pretty much uninterruptedly until today.
jghn 10y ago
I first encountered the WWW in the fall of 93. At first I was extremely confused, although Mosaic provided pulldowns for things like usenet and gopher, so I just assumed it was a GUI tool for that stuff. By the end of that year of school I was recording & visiting every URL I encountered, regardless of what it was. They were that novel. By the time the next school year started it was getting increasingly difficult to do that, I gave up some point in that Fall 94 semester. Sadly I was pretty adamant that the whole web thing was never going to take off and would be short lived. I suppose I got that one wrong.
- ci5er 10y ago
  I was fund-raising for a metered content play (DRM, I guess we'd call it now) in the fall of 94. You wouldn't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for data subscriptions on CD-ROMS, you could buy an article for $10 or $100 at a time. And, who knows? In the future - when this Internet thing takes off - and distribution is "free" - maybe people will pay a nickel to listen to a song they copied from their friend! All I got back was: "What's the Internet?" This was about a year after I left Motorola, for failing to be able to sell them on how content distribution between portable super-computers with built in wireless data modems was going to change the world. sigh. Oh, well. I guess they paid the price for their lack of vision! :-)
amelius 10y ago
I sometimes wonder if Berners Lee, when he invented the web, was doing his real job at CERN, or if he was doing it as a side-project (perhaps secretly in the time of CERN).
kingofspain 10y ago
Odd to think the first website I ever built for someone else will be 20 years old next year - and virtually unchanged. They've sold a lot of paint with 90's HTML!

31 points by acangiano 10y ago

Exciting times. I remember trying the Mosaic browser for the first time and thinking that it was at least as good as Gopher, and maybe better. It was inconceivable to me at the time that it would become what it is now. Hell, the "blink" command seemed pretty cutting-edge when it was added to HTML (as a joke, it turns out). I never imagined it would become basically indispensable for conducting most business or that it would become the replacement for tv.

jazoom 10y ago
I never imagined it would become basically indispensable for conducting most business or that it would become the replacement for tv. I initially thought you were referring to the blink command.

colmvp 10y ago

That time will always have a place in my heart. An age where we were largely limited to a couple fonts, where Times New Roman was de facto, where hyperlinks were almost always blue with underlines, where quirky animated gifs were ubiquitous, where design and user experience was very raw and still undiscovered... it was indeed a simpler time!

doozy 10y ago

"By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers - of which 2000 were commercial - and 10 million users." That was the time I first gained internet access. So that puts me well within the first 1% of internet users. The web felt huge even then. But it was much slower, I still remember my 14.4 kbit/s modem.

djKianoosh 10y ago
same here, through my aunt's computer at her law offices. i was able to find neat websites from professors talking about all kinds of things and looking at the source html is how I learned it in the first place. good times
- doozy 10y ago
  That's how we all learned. That, and I remember downloading Netscape 2.0 and finding an html tutorial in the help menu. I should start claiming 20+ years of web development experience. I also adopted their mail client, I've been using its successors pretty much uninterruptedly until today.

jghn 10y ago

I first encountered the WWW in the fall of 93. At first I was extremely confused, although Mosaic provided pulldowns for things like usenet and gopher, so I just assumed it was a GUI tool for that stuff. By the end of that year of school I was recording & visiting every URL I encountered, regardless of what it was. They were that novel. By the time the next school year started it was getting increasingly difficult to do that, I gave up some point in that Fall 94 semester. Sadly I was pretty adamant that the whole web thing was never going to take off and would be short lived. I suppose I got that one wrong.

ci5er 10y ago
I was fund-raising for a metered content play (DRM, I guess we'd call it now) in the fall of 94. You wouldn't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for data subscriptions on CD-ROMS, you could buy an article for $10 or $100 at a time. And, who knows? In the future - when this Internet thing takes off - and distribution is "free" - maybe people will pay a nickel to listen to a song they copied from their friend! All I got back was: "What's the Internet?" This was about a year after I left Motorola, for failing to be able to sell them on how content distribution between portable super-computers with built in wireless data modems was going to change the world. sigh. Oh, well. I guess they paid the price for their lack of vision! :-)

amelius 10y ago

I sometimes wonder if Berners Lee, when he invented the web, was doing his real job at CERN, or if he was doing it as a side-project (perhaps secretly in the time of CERN).

kingofspain 10y ago

Odd to think the first website I ever built for someone else will be 20 years old next year - and virtually unchanged. They've sold a lot of paint with 90's HTML!