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This is experimental. However, it could start a revolution in information access
- davidmathers 16y agoI remember well what happened when I first saw this: I tried running the text browser via my telnet session, thought "this sucks", and went back to using gopher. Then at some point Wired magazine removed their archives from gopher and put them on WWW. At first I was like "fuck you Wired" but then I was like "actually this WWW thing isn't so bad after all."
- three14 16y agoI had the same reaction, until I finally saw a web page with images in Mosaic on an SGI.
- tobtoh 16y agoReading this announcement is like being able to see the first drop of water that starts off the Amazon river. Something so 'normal' to start with and yet ends up awe-inspiring by the end.
- bconway 16y agoAnd yet, that damn fax machine is still just as alive and kicking today as it was in 1991.
- dasil003 16y agoWell not quite. Now you can laugh in people's face when they ask you to fax something and they will look sheepish rather than glaring at you.
- ultrasaurus 16y agoAnd when they fax you back it'll be at an online service that mails you a PDF. And they're none the wiser.
- Dylanlacey 16y agoF.....aaax? Dull look
- DanI-S 16y agoMeh, it'll never catch on.
- hackermom 16y agoI'll give it a year, tops - until the next "latest buzz" comes along.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoNo wireless. Less space than an iPod. Lame.
- roofone 16y agoNo wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoWell, definitely less space than a nomad, since the iPod had less space than a nomad in the original quote we're both referencing (well, I'm referencing, and you're repeating).
- roofone 16y agoNot repeating, correcting.
- rapind 16y agoDoes it come with any gamez?
- jfb 16y agoACTUAL JFB QUOTE FROM SEEING AN EARLY (LATE 91?) DEMO: This sucks. Why would anybody switch from Gopher?
- brlewis 16y agoI think it was 1992 that TBL was going around selling the WWW to different organizations. That's the year I worked on MIT's TechInfo, similar to gopher. TechInfo had great tools for information providers, but it was still an uphill battle getting departments to keep their info up-to-date. Since the WWW required a lot more knowledge and effort, it seemed hopeless to think you could ever base a campus-wide information system on it. I didn't see TBL's pitch myself at that time, but the senior people on the project did, and they showed me the lame terminal browser. NeXT was the only graphical browser available. I agreed with them that hypertext was too unstructured. Give it to regular people and you'd have chaos. When Mosaic introduced the IMG tag and people could actually embed images in hypertext, that's when the demos started to get impressive and the web took off.
- elliottcarlson 16y agoNice to see this announcement... Makes me remember what I was doing back in those days - and makes me wonder what other HN'ers were doing back then. I was 12, playing on BBS' and attempting to teach myself Turbo Pascal so I could possibly write IGM's for Legend of the Red Dragon...
- kiba 16y agoI was an...infant.
- die_sekte 16y agoI wasn't even born yet.
- influx 16y agoLikewise except also attempting to script out Trade Wars 2002. And yes, 2002 seemed futuristic too damn it.
- binarymax 16y agoThat very month I was also 12, and at a summer camp at RIT learning 'robotics' and doing animations in Mac hypercard! Man how times have changed.
- aidenn0 16y agoI was 11 programming in GW Basic. My dad didn't give me a copy of his C compiler until a year later.
- statictype 16y agoAlso 11. Also GW Basic. I was learning on my own and asked my mom if I could get a book on programming. She bought me some book on Basic, only issue was that it was targeted at people trying to write finance and accounting management programs (mom didn't really know one from another so not really her fault). My eyes glazeth over and it took me a few years to regain my interest/confidence in programming. I still blame that book.
- mambodog 16y agoIf anyone wants to take it for a spin: http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/Apps/Internet/WWW/Web%20Browsers/First_Web_Browser/ http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/App... Note: NEXTSTEP required. Runs pretty well in VMWare. EDIT: If you're running a VM you'll want the "33fat" (fat binary) one. Also here is the Obj-C source code: http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/ http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/
- crocowhile 16y agoAnd this is way doing research for living means having the best job in the world. Most likely you are not going to be rich by any mean, but once in a while what you do will change the world.
- subbu 16y agoHypertext?? A bunch of special characters around text? Nah. Its too simple.
- junkbit 16y agoHmm read/write web browser/editor? So Web 0.1 was Web 2.0
- user24 16y agoyes, it really was! TBL's been trying to 'put the lid back on' and get the web closer to his original vision ever since!
- roadnottaken 16y agoLink broken ?
- martin_kirch 16y agoBroken link here too Can we have another one or the message's title?
- djacobs 16y agoI'm guessing it's broken only for people who have upgraded to the new Google Groups.
- mambodog 16y agoGoogle cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rLTkCRaHIM4J:groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.announce/msg/042c02b1b5992dd3 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rLTkCRa... Screencap: http://i.imgur.com/nkBnu.png http://i.imgur.com/nkBnu.png
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sfphotoarts 16y agoSome kind of irony in a broken link I think.
- Splines 16y agoI don't know if it's just me, but the link appears to be broken. > We're sorry, but we were unable to find the topic you were looking for. Perhaps the URL you clicked on is out of date or broken?
- seejay 16y agoIt's not just you
- BobbyH 16y agoHere is the text of the link: Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.announce Followup-To: poster From: ti...@nxoc01.cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee) Date: 20 Aug 91 01:54:41 GMT Local: Mon, Aug 19 1991 9:54 pm Subject: WorldWideWeb wide-area hypertext app available The WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release in source and binary form from info.cern.ch. WorldWideWeb is a hypertext browser/editor which allows one to read information from local files and remote servers. It allows hypertext links to be made and traversed, and also remote indexes to be interrogated for lists of useful documents. Local files may be edited, and links made from areas of text to other files, remote files, remote indexes, remote index searches, internet news groups and articles. All these sources of information are presented in a consistent way to the reader. For example, an index search returns a hypertext document with pointers to documents matching the query. Internet news articles are displayed with hypertext links to other referenced articles and groups. The code is not strictly public domain: it is copyright CERN (see copyright notice is in the .tar), but is free to collaborating institutes. Also available is a portable line mode browser which allows hypertext to be browsed by anyone with a dumb ascii terminal emulator. Hypertext may be made public by putting on an anonymous FTP server, or by using a HTTP daemon. A skeleton HTTP daemon is also available in source form. A server may be written to make other existing data readable by WWW browsers. Files are /pub/WWWNeXTStepEditor_0.12.tar.Z NeXT application + sources /pub/WWWLineMode_0.11.tar.Z Portable Line Mode Browser /pub/WWWDaemon_0.1.tar.Z Simple server Basic documentation is enclosed. Details about our project and about hypertext in general are available in hypertext form on our servers, as are lists of known bugs and features. This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access. We are currently using WWW for user support at CERN. We would be very interested in comments from anyone trying WWW, and especially those making other data available, as part of a truly world-wide web. Tim BL ___________________________________________________________________________ Tim Berners-Lee ti...@info.cern.ch World Wide Web project Tel: +41(22)767 3755 CERN Fax: +41(22)767 7155 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
- junkbit 16y agoAugust 1991: WWW goes live; Linux Kernel announced; USSR collapsed; SNES English release; Terminator 2 was in the cinemas and Smells Like Teen Spirit had its radio début. What a month
- wildmXranat 16y agoGoosebumps ^_^
- bobf 16y agoWhat a month indeed! The first two are really only interesting to the masses in hindsight though. I wonder how many interesting technological advances happen every month that we don't realize until years later.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoRobert Goddard's initial liquid fueled rocketry projects received generally negative publicity (a well-known NY Times editorial denounced the very idea that a rocket could operate outside the Earth's atmosphere, for example). The transistor initially received very minor media coverage. For years the laser was derided as a solution looking for a problem.
- balakk 16y agoWe didn't start the fire..
- die_sekte 16y agoAlso that war in the Balkans.
- Zecc 16y agoAccording to [Wikipedia][1], the Gulf War ended February 28th, when Pres. George W. declared a ceasefire (though Operation Desert Storm kept going until 1995). [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War
- Kilimanjaro 16y agoI wonder why the didn't pick web. instead of www. Not the best alternative for sure but at least a thousand times easier to pronounce.
- jamespitts 16y agoWhile it was wordy, the use of www and "world wide web" added a certain cuteness and folksiness to the technology. This, along with the very simplicity of setting up a web page, helped fuel its adoption. WWW indicated that the technology was about community and universal access, and early art appearing on the web fed into this. The smiling-fat-spider-on-a-web and the Earth-meshed-with-circuits may have not seemed so inviting if it were just a web and not The World Wide Web! Plus it sure was enjoyable to watch people on television stumble through double-U double-U double-U dot...
- eru 16y agoMaybe because they were based in Switzerland, and did not say double-you?
- pluies 16y agoThat's an interesting take. However, Tim Berners-Lee is English (born in London), and the CERN is located in Genève, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. In French, 'w' is pronounced "double-vé" (quick & dirty phonetic translation would be "doobleh-vay" in English). Neither English nor French really make pronouncing "www" easy. I tried to find out how 'w' is pronounced in German, but I didn't have much luck. Does anybody knows?
- ericb 16y ago> However, it could start a revolution in information access. He has a gift for statement (not over or under).
- eru 16y agoI'm whelmed.
- presidentender 16y agoI'm fairly plussed.
- andreyf 16y agoInteresting, I never realized this connection: A NeXT Computer was used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN to develop the world's first web server software, CERN HTTPd, and also used to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb. This workstation became the world's first web server on the Internet. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer
- scrod 16y agoAs mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, the first web browser was indeed written in Objective-C, using the AppKit framework.
- zandorg 16y agoSo as NeXT founder, Steve Jobs was indirectly responsible for HTML? Of course, Marc Andreessen was responsible for images and also porting the NeXT code to Windows/MacOS.
- natch 16y agoWhy would anyone need this when they have Gopher?
- 27182818284 16y agoGoogle's 20 year archive has a lot of fun little posts like this. http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html
- mitchellhislop 16y agoI was about to turn 3. I am sure that I was geeky, and trying to program my high-chair, but never the less, still just learning the world. I do wish that I would have been more in the 10-11 year old range. So much excellent stuff happened that year - just a few months after that, the Minnesota Twins won the series.
- zecho 16y agoIn the most dramatic Fall Classic of all time.
- chmike 16y agoA colleague, who was present when Tim presented the WWW at a CERN seminar in its early days, reported to me that one person in the assistance asked at the end of the presentation what was the use for this software (quelle est l'utilité de ce logiciel).
- jcfrei 16y agoWhat I still dont get: was this server accessible from anywhere, or just from within the local cern network? when were the root nameservers put into service, so you could access any server via an URL? I'm guessing the infrastructure for the internet was already in place - what Tim Berners-Lee established was a new protocol that enabled the simple exchange of documents between remote computers... Am I getting this right?
- brlewis 16y agoIt was accessible throughout the Internet. If you knew the http protocol you could telnet to port 80 and get pages (still works today).
- storborg 16y agoThis is purely intellectual curiosity, but does anyone have those tarballs?
- Archaeum 16y agoThe announcement includes a notice akin to a primitive open source license: The code is not strictly public domain: it is copyright CERN (see copyright notice is in the .tar), but is free to collaborating institutes. Was it typical back then to release code while retaining the copyright as opposed to making it public domain?