13 ms·

The web is 30 years old today

754 points by Anon84 6y ago

codeulike 6y ago
Is it as young as that? I'm surprised. One of the earliest web sites I can remember is this one: "The Really Big Button That Doesn't Do Anything" http://stefangagne.com/spatulacity/button.htm http://stefangagne.com/spatulacity/button.htm I think I was led there via "Yahoo Cool Site Of The Day" All the comments are still there! I remember laughing at the "stereo fell off the bureau" one. A comment I left there in 1994 is still there.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >Is it as young as that? I'm surprised. And, really, 30 years overstates it. You need another 5 years before all the pieces came together to make something that really looks like the modern web and maybe even a couple more before it really started having an effect on even tech-savvy audiences.
- bserge 6y ago
  Indeed. I sometimes remember how living was before the Internet, before a computer in every house and in every pocket. Paper maps, incandescent lighbulbs with less lumen output than any smartphone, CRT displays, LCD panels as thick as a MacBook Air (a modern OLED is as thin as paper!), libraries with actual books (that never had enough information), payphones... I'd say things got a lot better :D
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >that never had enough information One of the things that periodically strikes me as someone who was a product manager from the mid-80s through the 90s is how hard it was to get information. For example, I remember we paid one company a fair bit of money to fax us any data sheets they had on specific competitive products when we were about to do a product announcement. (Oh, and we paid them for each category of computer systems we wanted access to information on.) Basically, everyone sent this firm their data sheets because we couldn't really ask each other directly. That was how one did competitive analysis. I think if I were to go back in time, I'd quit after a week because I would feel I simply didn't have access to the information I needed to do my job.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Awww, I'm so disappointed that the guestbook is broken. Guestbooks were one of the best features of the early web. And by "best" I mean "pointless nostalgia," but... :)
- barbarbar 6y ago
  That site is fast. Even on a mobile connection.
tobr 6y ago
I can't see anything on the linked page to suggest that the web was "born" 30 years ago today (i.e. 20 December 1990). On the contrary, it says it was invented in 1989. Wikipedia[1] lists the official release date of the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, as 25 December 1990. Tim Berners-Lee has said that the first version was "whimsically dated 901225 although I was NOT working on Christmas Day -- it was prepared some time before closed for Christmas"[2] - so maybe that works out to 30 years ago today? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb 2: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cpach 6y ago
  I found this document https://web.archive.org/web/20130605043221/https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-birth-of-the-World-Wide-Web https://web.archive.org/web/20130605043221/https://timeline.... It says “The world’s first website and server go live at CERN” on 1990-12-20
  - muyuu 6y ago
    it's weird that this page is not public anymore the history page here https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-birth-of-the-World-Wide-Web https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-birth-of-the-Worl... doesn't list this date - does list the availability of the browser in xmas day
- smarx007 6y ago
  CERN celebrated the 30th anniversary on 2019-03-12 https://home.cern/events/web30 https://home.cern/events/web30, but I do agree that celebrating the day the first (public) web server went up is a bit more symbolic than the day the proposal was submitted.
est 6y ago
I remember decades ago when I first dialed up to the Internet. Went for the good knowledge on telnet bbs and usenet, stayed for the memes on www.
- macintux 6y ago
  All I particularly remember from Usenet: jms interacting with Babylon 5 fans, and Serdar Argic's ongoing efforts to invert the history of the Armenian genocide.
BillyTheKing 6y ago
I find it fascinating that the web changed just about every industry out there, apart from the one it set out to change - academic publishing.. It's still an oligopoly, with the same, small number of players acting as gatekeepers
- bsenftner 6y ago
  So, in a perverse view, the web is civilization's largest, most epic failure: it altered our entire civilization, yet left the one aspect it was intended to change alone.
- ConcreteGidget 6y ago
  Except I can now pirate. RIP Aaron Swartz
- gaudat 6y ago
  At least we can enjoy Libgen and Sci-Hub's effort to make those knowledge available for free to us, the motivated. We owe them a big thanks.
  - samoa42 6y ago
    while i too apreciate those services, it's not like they invented publication of pirated content.
- breck 6y ago
  It would be great if a big band of Doctorates got together and committed to renouncing their PhDs if copyright (at the very least in the scientific domain) is not abolished. They have the power to do that. 30 years after the great gift of the web we are still waiting, and Alexandra Elbakyan has shown us how amazing it is to have all scientific papers be available to everyone.
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    Why would that make for a reasonable threat to the publishers or government? The power the academics have here is much more direct, if they are organised enough to make such an action: they can simply stop using the journals (indeed many fields and subfields do not use such closed-access journals).
dannyw 6y ago
I still find the web to be so beautiful. I can talk and meet people all around the world. I can stream hundreds of videos around every conceivable topic, in 4K60 resolution, on-demand. I can make a livelihood without ever stepping feet out of my home; and conversely, work from almost anywhere that'll give me a visa. The digitized information of our civilization is just one search away.
- diggan 6y ago
  I agree with you overall, but the internet never been more geofenced than what we see today. Tons of content is no longer available to me as I live in the EU and apparently american companies care so much about my privacy that I can no longer access their websites. Growing up in the 90s, I remember a internet that was without geographical limitations and people doing things for love of that thing, not the perversion we see today...
  - bserge 6y ago
    It looks to me like it will get worse... I hope not.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Well, the EU has passed regulations and if I'm a business and don't make money from you and it takes money/effort to even verify whether I'm compliant with those regulations (or if I simply consider them a risk), nothing personal, but I'm going to geoblock you. That's not a comment on whether the regulations are good or bad. It's just that, as a business, if you're not a profitable customer or potential customer, I don't want to interact with you if you create any risk/cost for me.
    - diggan 6y ago
      Yeah, that makes sense. My point is just that, the web is all business now, and people use that to justify their decisions. It didn't use to be that way, but because of the commercialisation of the internet, we're now here, which means tons of people no longer has access to information they would if the web was still focusing on being open.
ericzawo 6y ago
We're going to be remembered as the last generation before the internet.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  We? I think roughly around my year of birth (2001 - if that makes anyone feel old) is one of the last to grow up with "proper" computers rather than just iPads and phones.
  - bserge 6y ago
    On that note, it's always funny how kids try to use old hardware like a touchscreen
    - freehunter 6y ago
      Heck I’m in my 30s and I do that sometimes. I just set up a new Mac after using an iPad Pro for a few months and the number of times I touched the screen is embarrassing.
    - tilt_error 6y ago
      Say no more :) https://youtu.be/hShY6xZWVGE https://youtu.be/hShY6xZWVGE
      - bserge 6y ago
        Ha, voice control was all the rage for a while... before everyone realized it's just impractical
        jakeva 6y ago
        Maybe you forgot about Siri, Ok Google, Cortana, Alexa?
        bserge 6y ago
bsenftner 6y ago
The web became popular to mainstream culture a few years later. Although I'd been using arpnet for over a decade due to university access, I first encountered a "web browser" while working at Electronic Arts on the yet to be released 3D0 in '93 -'94. However, nobody cared diddly squat about "the web", it was empty or nonsense like usenet forums. We only cared about was DOWNLOADING DOOM! Id software released Doom, it it was available as an "web download link". That was the initial reason everyone at E.A. got exposure to the web, to download Doom.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I have a 1992 edition of O'Reilly's The Whole Internet. The WWW merits a very short chapter in the vein of there's this new fangled thing that came out of CERN. (But, really, let's talk about Gopher.)
- freehunter 6y ago
  My dad co-owned a small company in the early 90s and they just got new computers but he convinced the rest of the owners that they needed to invest in serial network equipment “to share files”. In reality they ended up playing multiplayer Doom with it.
- conductr 6y ago
  It’s kind of like where Bitcoin is at (mid-90s web). Most of general public has heard of it by now, of those using most just came because “get rich quick”, and meanwhile nobody really knows if it’s even useful.
  - sollewitt 6y ago
    By the time the web was as old as bitcoin is now, we were already the other side of the dot com boom/bust and Amazon had a market cap of $2.25B. The web changed everything very quickly.
samizdis 6y ago
I remember transitioning from Prestel, where in the mid-80s I played the MMO Shades [1], to the web and then getting more and more despondent as year after year the experience seemed to degrade as everyone and their dog went online. [1] https://www.prestel.org.uk/download.php?cat=15_Prestel&file=Shades-the%20utimate%20adventure%20MUGSept1989.pdf https://www.prestel.org.uk/download.php?cat=15_Prestel&file=... Edit to add: Prestel was an interactive service run by the UK Post Office. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel
vfc1 6y ago
The web is just getting started, I don't see it hitting a stable point before it its 50 years old or so. More and more transactions are made online as opposed to before. More and more jobs are available online, but it's still a small percentage. Imagine when most of everyone's shopping is done online, when half the people work remotely, and when all countries in the world not just the most developed ones have full access to fast internet.
gaudat 6y ago
And now the web is not world-wide anymore thanks to big-tech making censored, cookie-cutter walled gardens to the general public. I forgot the last time I typed 'www.' in an URL. Every friend of mine have their own blog or personal website when I started out on the web around a decade ago. This spirit has largely vanished with the domination of Facebook and other social networks. What we got is remnants of the old web in "old-looking" websites now. Like here.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Your friends were a tiny slice of the public. I do get the concerns about walled gardens. But very few people had their own blogs or websites. And many of those who did still have them.
mhh__ 6y ago
Thanks Tim https://youtu.be/UMNFehJIi0E https://youtu.be/UMNFehJIi0E
- system2 6y ago
  Rather bizarre celebration.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
And to think Al Gore was only 42 then
- dang 6y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
stevespang 6y ago
And behold the privacy violating, intrusive, malware inhabited, monopoly ridden POS it has become. From huge corporations to Russian and Chinese hackers - - - the root of all evil is money
annoyingnoob 6y ago
Before the web we had BBSs and computer friends would meet in person gasp.
- IanClarke 6y ago
  They are famous and it comes up regularly, but younger people won't know about "the Usenet" or Bully Boards (BBS). They were awesome for their time: They had awesome, engaging features, maybe on a "nerd" level O:-), back then not accessible for everyone. Today we have much better ways to interact online, kind of with the whole world and somehow everyone is online, today. Locality has lost on importance, since ways to interact remotely/online became more powerful and also accessible for all. It's really interesting where this leads to in the future. E.g. WFH (work from home, especially emphasized by "Covid"): Companies might outsource development to the lowest COL (cost of living) area in that vein. Also: Everyone is globally connected, better and better, yet somehow more and more "home alone". So interesting, somehow unavoidable and it's open to see where this develops and if we manage to make these developments positive and get the negatives under control for all/most involved.
  - annoyingnoob 6y ago
    Yep, the internet is an improvement and it changed the world. We are all better off for it. I suppose the article brought me back to a different time. That original all text green-on-black, terminal-like, view really took me back to the BBS (Bulletin Board System) days. You might not remember but modems were a thing before the internet, I can remember my Dad tying up the house phone for hours while dialed into the mainframe at the office. And the early days of the internet probably looked like a service like Prodigy for a lot of people. Prodigy was a fancy BBS. And everything had to work at dial-up speed. Even Berners-Lee's original pages would have been data-conserving and fast. Its interesting that the user experience in those times felt, and probably was, faster. Our fancy modern graphics take a lot of resources in comparison. While its easy to point to numerous benefits to the modern internet, we've slipped in terms of time to display info on the screen. Modern web apps treat bandwidth and storage as infinite and free resources, its really the opposite of what we used to do and maybe not for the better. I suppose that the key difference is that Berners-Lee's WWW used the benefit of an always-connected network. Where the BBS days were all about temporary network connections. While we use WWW and Internet almost interchangeably, its the always-connected network - the concept of packet switching over circuit switching - that brought the benefit of the WWW. I'm sure in 30 more years we'll have things I can't imagine today, its the power of the network.
known 6y ago
Humanity is indebted to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
spacedcowboy 6y ago
When I set up my first website, you had to email CERN to be put on a list of websites around the world, that was published on their website... I think it was about the 60th (I forget the exact number, it was a long time ago :) website in the UK, serving the “needs” of (ok, playing with tech for) the image processing group in Kings College London’s physics dept while doing my PhD. The server ran on my desktop DECstation 3100, a 16MHz R2000 with a 1024x864 1-bit display named asterix.ph.kcl.ac.uk - Yeah, 1-bit. In the image-processing dept... still, it was more than 10x faster than the microvax that served the rest of the dept! It’s kind of amazing to me, having lived through all the change, that a modern Arm SOC like the $5 Pi-0 would blow away that at-the-time (1989) high-end workstation, in every respect. In the dust. In comparison, the first computer I ever got was the ZX81 (in 1981, so about 8 years earlier) and it had 1K of RAM, came as components that I soldered to the motherboard (I was 11 at the time, soldering was old-hat) and I was more interested in the black-and-white, dial-tuned, portable TV that I could have in my bedroom that came with it :) But to go from that to the DEC 3100 in such a short time was also massive progress.
- samstave 6y ago
  I love stories of yore like this. I got my first machine in ~1985 or so... I convinced my dad he needed a machine for his business - and then I just played populous and called long distance from Tahoe to a BBS in San Jose to play the pit and trade wars. I got grounded for a month because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad was furious. He yelled at me one time and said "stop wasting your time on the damn computer - it will never do anything for you!" Years later - after a successful time working in Silicon Valley building out many a thing, my dad came to my house and he apologized for yelling at me for "wasting time on the computer" - and I was touched that he remembered that time from when I was 11 and he said that... My first machine was a Tandy 1000 - and I was also calling in to PC-Link (which later became AOL) to chat with strangers....
  - bartread 6y ago
    > because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad was furious Blimey. I'm not surprised. In today's money that's $2,239.52. You were like a very early forerunner of those kids running up massive credit card bills on in-app purchases. Great story though: thanks for sharing.
rurban 6y ago
I doubt that this was the first website and webserver. Just the first HTTP server. Previously GOPHER did exist, also with multimedia extensions to view videos and images, and other/better types of webservers, eg. Microcosm, Memex, Xandru, Dexter or esp. Hyper-G via the HTP protocol (Hyper Text Protocol) or just via emacs. Hyper-G servers had link consistency and clients had embedded search. But worse and free was better, Hyper-G and Microcosm were proprietary. First Hyper-G installation around 1989 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220349551_The_Hyper-G_Network_Information_System https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220349551_The_Hyper... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282504095_Analysis_for_the_Overwhelming_Success_of_the_Web_Compared_to_Microcosm_and_Hyper-G_Systems https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282504095_Analysis_...
- ghaff 6y ago
  By definition, the "web" is HTTP. Of course there were files hosted on servers prior to the WWW. Including direct predecessors such as, as you mention, Gopher. But they weren't the web.
  - rurban 6y ago
    Nope, you mix that up with WWW. I browsed the web before CERN published their HTTP server and clients. E.g. the newsgroups were called Internet long before. The Web was the abbrevation of Internet. WWW was the multimedia enriched variant of the web, with a XML format and a state-less server. State-less on purpose, in constrast to the existing stateful servers those days, with proper login and the server keeping each clients state. This didn't scale, so the worse and simplier WWW technology succeeded. Cookies had to be invented to catch up.
    - ratww 6y ago
      Not really, Web has always been the third W on WWW, aka "World Wide Web". The term "WorldWideWeb" was coined by Robert Cailliau, a colleague of Tim Berners-Lee in CERN. I've never seen your definition being used before, even by Gopher or Usenet enthusiasts.
082349872349872 6y ago
Obligatory TimBL (as he was 30 years ago) and V. Cerf pic: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-656d4d361de6a7fc4104cc98e33f4057 https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-656d4d361de6a7fc4104cc...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
heresie-dabord 6y ago
The importance of the WWW for me has been research papers and books, dev tools, and jazz & classical music. Although I use it every day, the WWW has become something that I actively mistrust. There are too many predators, both commercial and espionage. I scrape WWW pages from the terminal and download archives for offline reference. Just to use what TBL conceived, it has been necessary to develop multi-layered defence: router, firewall, dns doh and filters, VPN, firejail, browser extensions. I think it's safe to say that this is not what most users have in mind when they buy a shiny new computer and "connect to the Internet".
- roastytoasty 6y ago
  Agreed. I am also saddened that there is some things that I was too lazy to download for offline use and is now no longer available online.
- OpticalWindows 6y ago
  There may be a few sites I don't know about but I wish there was a reputable resource that saved archived information. I think libraries should archive everything on the internet if they haven't already. It would be really neat to give students the ability to surf the web of 2001's ecetera. By archiving the internet I mean everything. Search engine performance on each date, ads, social traffic.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago
And what a mess it is compared to then.
nalekberov 6y ago
The web is very fascinating space for me. Back in university years I started to realize how much powerful is web. One doesn't have to buy a lot of book in order to learn new things. It's just amazing. And yet I am a bit pessimistic about the future of the web, in the beginning we all hoped it will created new space, where we will be able to freely speak and share our thoughts, in fact today's web turns into a space where surveillance has become a standard. The web was created for people, not for capitalists.
- krapp 6y ago
  The web was created for people, and capitalists are also people.
CTOSian 6y ago
looks like yesterday I used BBS's to outdial to the web :'-) +++ ATZ
hit8run 6y ago
Ah good times. No adblocker needed and a sophisticated audience :D
- neatze 6y ago
  Just use ublock and no-script add-ons in your browser.
- danmg 6y ago
  Not that much content either at least on the "web".
papito 6y ago
The Web accelerated everything. The speed of picking up knowledge and general developments has multiplied by who knows how much. The know-how in every single vocation is no longer compartmentalized. A chef comes up with a new trend in an Austin restaurant, a few weeks later it's all over L.A. Thank you for visiting! Please sign my guestbook.
- Kye 6y ago
  Part of the reason we got a covid-19 vaccine so fast is because researchers posted the genetic sequence of the virus on the web for anyone to download. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/china-releases-genetic-data-new-coronavirus-now-deadly https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/china-re... I can't find much more than that because mainstream search engines increasingly don't return relevant or useful results.
nabla9 6y ago
My first web experience was remote telnet connection into just that workstation in CERN. It was common to allow anonymous telnet logins back then. The protocol was to use the username "anonymous" as a login name and maybe your email address as a password as a courtesy. I experimented a little. My impression was that it was very much like a gopher but not as organized and has less content. So I logged out and forgot about it. Then game Mosaic.
ArtWomb 6y ago
For a glimpse of what discussions looked like at the dawn of the public web ("slow, mostly local connections; a growing accumulation of posts; the absence of surveillance and metrics"), Rhizome has just released a painstaking "emulation" of The Thing BBS net art discussion forum. How ironic that the "last avant garde of the 20th century" should now be enshrined forever by an NEH Digital Humanities grant when it was considered too outre for even modern art museums! “Did We Dream Enough?” THE THING BBS as an Experiment in Social-Cyber Sculpture And with projects like Ruffle, the Rust Flash Player emulator, we can imagine a continuous re-examination of the web's early aesthetics RIP Adobe Flash: Five Takeaways About the Plug-in’s Legacy in Net Art https://hyperallergic.com/609682/rip-adobe-flash-five-takeaways-about-the-plug-ins-legacy-in-net-art/ https://hyperallergic.com/609682/rip-adobe-flash-five-takeaw...
- ArtWomb 6y ago
  Link: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/dec/16/did-we-dream-enough-the-thing-bbs/ https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/dec/16/did-we-dream-enoug...
forgotmypw17 6y ago
How sad it makes me that this site requires js and new browser to view... It would have been so easy to make it compatible in the spirit of the web.
- dcwca 6y ago
  The spirit of the web isn’t frozen in time.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    I'd say that inclusivity and accessibility are pretty basic cornerstones though.
joelbluminator 6y ago
Anyone remembers "the web is dead" articles by Wired from a few years ago?
tdeck 6y ago
The web was designed for progressive loading, so why does every page on CERN's website seem to have a custom interstitial loading indicator? This is one of those trends that should never have happened.
froh 6y ago
Would it make sense to use this link? Which references December 1990 as the first web http server and http client browser/ editor life in cern? https://timeline.web.cern.ch/worlds-first-browsereditor-website-and-server-go-live-cern https://timeline.web.cern.ch/worlds-first-browsereditor-webs...
jabo 6y ago
Interesting that ffmpeg was started on the 10th anniversary of the web: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25487711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25487711
fortran77 6y ago
I remember when someone walked into my office about 27 years ago (in 1993) and showed me NCSA Mosaic on SunOS. I was mesmerized. And my productivity hasn't been the same since.
severino 6y ago
I find it really exciting to be part of a generation that discovered the internet (which was mostly a synonym for the www and the irc) in the mid-late 90s, as opposed to the current ones who had always internet present in their lives. Back then, at least in my country, internet connections were very scarce, nobody had internet at home and "connecting" to the internet was actually a thing... So you can perfectly remember the first time you got into the internet, which one was the first site you visited, from where, and how you discovered that world that today almost everybody is familiar with.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  > nobody had internet at home There were no residential ISPs in the early days. You had to work or study somewhere with internet access. And home connectivity was all dial-up. DSL was completely unaffordable. And even then, home computers lacked a TCP/IP stack, so you’d be dialling into a server using something like z-modem, and using that to access the internet.
- movedx 6y ago
  I'm in the same boat as you. I had to go to my local college when I was 11 to use their Internet. They offered it for free on weekends. There I learned JavaScript and C from the guy who I'd say basically launched my interest and therefore my career into what it is today. I remember downloading "large" (Warzone is 250GB!) files and splitting them up, copying them to multiple floppies disks. Now I've got 1TB in my back pack! Those were the days when websites were just tables... I miss those simple times :P
testfoobar 6y ago
I remember using akebono.Stanford.edu
zeckalpha 6y ago
Wasn’t it back in November?
Seb-C 6y ago
I feel lucky that as a developer I have had the chance to participate in building the web in my lifetime. Of course I am just one person among the millions that builds it, so I am humbled but also very proud of it. I cannot think of a single invention in human's history that federated so many people together as the web, and it is beautiful.
gjvc 6y ago
"this has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS.." If you can spare three and a half minutes (start time set to the relevant point) to watch the video [1]from 1997 below... https://youtu.be/aYT2se94eU0?t=1279 https://youtu.be/aYT2se94eU0?t=1279 ...then you might enjoy the different point of view as discussed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lfyou/alan_kay_in_1997_html_has_gone_back_to_dark_ages/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lfyou/alan_ka... It comes up on HN from time to time, but I thought an alternative source of discussion (second link above) might add something new. [1] if you have never watched this talk completely at least once, give it a shot and you might be very surprised.
shimonabi 6y ago
I remember feeling frustrated in 1997 as a kid when I uploaded an image via FTP and it was displayed all garbled on the web. I emailed the academic network admin and he wrote me back that I have to set the mode to BINARY. :)
tehlike 6y ago
Crazy to think that if I were born just a decade earlier, I would have probably be in a different career. If memory serves my first machine was a rating, then a 120mhz, then p3 800mhz, then amd my dad built, then my first laptop in 2007. Growing up in a developing country, I feel myself lucky. Picked up programming at a very early age, had my first websites (can't remember the order) on virtualave.net/tripod and some regional isp, in addition to serving stuff from my own machine. Learned vb6 and asp, then .net and so on. Crazy ride, loving every minute
MEASSYoucan 6y ago
I hope that the web can get better if it is used creatively and positively. This will require those have it to give and share best practices to those who have not, if that makes sense.
NoPicklez 6y ago
Its honestly incredible, thinking that my father who I still consider to be young. Was born when the web didn't exist. There is nothing that I can think of that comes close to such a huge change.

754 points by Anon84 6y ago

Is it as young as that? I'm surprised. One of the earliest web sites I can remember is this one: "The Really Big Button That Doesn't Do Anything" http://stefangagne.com/spatulacity/button.htm http://stefangagne.com/spatulacity/button.htm I think I was led there via "Yahoo Cool Site Of The Day" All the comments are still there! I remember laughing at the "stereo fell off the bureau" one. A comment I left there in 1994 is still there.

ghaff 6y ago
>Is it as young as that? I'm surprised. And, really, 30 years overstates it. You need another 5 years before all the pieces came together to make something that really looks like the modern web and maybe even a couple more before it really started having an effect on even tech-savvy audiences.
bserge 6y ago
Indeed. I sometimes remember how living was before the Internet, before a computer in every house and in every pocket. Paper maps, incandescent lighbulbs with less lumen output than any smartphone, CRT displays, LCD panels as thick as a MacBook Air (a modern OLED is as thin as paper!), libraries with actual books (that never had enough information), payphones... I'd say things got a lot better :D
- ghaff 6y ago
  >that never had enough information One of the things that periodically strikes me as someone who was a product manager from the mid-80s through the 90s is how hard it was to get information. For example, I remember we paid one company a fair bit of money to fax us any data sheets they had on specific competitive products when we were about to do a product announcement. (Oh, and we paid them for each category of computer systems we wanted access to information on.) Basically, everyone sent this firm their data sheets because we couldn't really ask each other directly. That was how one did competitive analysis. I think if I were to go back in time, I'd quit after a week because I would feel I simply didn't have access to the information I needed to do my job.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
Awww, I'm so disappointed that the guestbook is broken. Guestbooks were one of the best features of the early web. And by "best" I mean "pointless nostalgia," but... :)
barbarbar 6y ago
That site is fast. Even on a mobile connection.

tobr 6y ago

I can't see anything on the linked page to suggest that the web was "born" 30 years ago today (i.e. 20 December 1990). On the contrary, it says it was invented in 1989. Wikipedia[1] lists the official release date of the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, as 25 December 1990. Tim Berners-Lee has said that the first version was "whimsically dated 901225 although I was NOT working on Christmas Day -- it was prepared some time before closed for Christmas"[2] - so maybe that works out to 30 years ago today? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb 2: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

deleted 6y ago
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cpach 6y ago
I found this document https://web.archive.org/web/20130605043221/https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-birth-of-the-World-Wide-Web https://web.archive.org/web/20130605043221/https://timeline.... It says “The world’s first website and server go live at CERN” on 1990-12-20
- muyuu 6y ago
  it's weird that this page is not public anymore the history page here https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-birth-of-the-World-Wide-Web https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-birth-of-the-Worl... doesn't list this date - does list the availability of the browser in xmas day
smarx007 6y ago
CERN celebrated the 30th anniversary on 2019-03-12 https://home.cern/events/web30 https://home.cern/events/web30, but I do agree that celebrating the day the first (public) web server went up is a bit more symbolic than the day the proposal was submitted.

est 6y ago

I remember decades ago when I first dialed up to the Internet. Went for the good knowledge on telnet bbs and usenet, stayed for the memes on www.

macintux 6y ago
All I particularly remember from Usenet: jms interacting with Babylon 5 fans, and Serdar Argic's ongoing efforts to invert the history of the Armenian genocide.

BillyTheKing 6y ago

I find it fascinating that the web changed just about every industry out there, apart from the one it set out to change - academic publishing.. It's still an oligopoly, with the same, small number of players acting as gatekeepers

bsenftner 6y ago
So, in a perverse view, the web is civilization's largest, most epic failure: it altered our entire civilization, yet left the one aspect it was intended to change alone.
ConcreteGidget 6y ago
Except I can now pirate. RIP Aaron Swartz
gaudat 6y ago
At least we can enjoy Libgen and Sci-Hub's effort to make those knowledge available for free to us, the motivated. We owe them a big thanks.
- samoa42 6y ago
  while i too apreciate those services, it's not like they invented publication of pirated content.
breck 6y ago
It would be great if a big band of Doctorates got together and committed to renouncing their PhDs if copyright (at the very least in the scientific domain) is not abolished. They have the power to do that. 30 years after the great gift of the web we are still waiting, and Alexandra Elbakyan has shown us how amazing it is to have all scientific papers be available to everyone.
- rcxdude 6y ago
  Why would that make for a reasonable threat to the publishers or government? The power the academics have here is much more direct, if they are organised enough to make such an action: they can simply stop using the journals (indeed many fields and subfields do not use such closed-access journals).

dannyw 6y ago

I still find the web to be so beautiful. I can talk and meet people all around the world. I can stream hundreds of videos around every conceivable topic, in 4K60 resolution, on-demand. I can make a livelihood without ever stepping feet out of my home; and conversely, work from almost anywhere that'll give me a visa. The digitized information of our civilization is just one search away.

diggan 6y ago
I agree with you overall, but the internet never been more geofenced than what we see today. Tons of content is no longer available to me as I live in the EU and apparently american companies care so much about my privacy that I can no longer access their websites. Growing up in the 90s, I remember a internet that was without geographical limitations and people doing things for love of that thing, not the perversion we see today...
- bserge 6y ago
  It looks to me like it will get worse... I hope not.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Well, the EU has passed regulations and if I'm a business and don't make money from you and it takes money/effort to even verify whether I'm compliant with those regulations (or if I simply consider them a risk), nothing personal, but I'm going to geoblock you. That's not a comment on whether the regulations are good or bad. It's just that, as a business, if you're not a profitable customer or potential customer, I don't want to interact with you if you create any risk/cost for me.
  - diggan 6y ago
    Yeah, that makes sense. My point is just that, the web is all business now, and people use that to justify their decisions. It didn't use to be that way, but because of the commercialisation of the internet, we're now here, which means tons of people no longer has access to information they would if the web was still focusing on being open.

ericzawo 6y ago

We're going to be remembered as the last generation before the internet.

mhh__ 6y ago
We? I think roughly around my year of birth (2001 - if that makes anyone feel old) is one of the last to grow up with "proper" computers rather than just iPads and phones.
- bserge 6y ago
  On that note, it's always funny how kids try to use old hardware like a touchscreen
  - freehunter 6y ago
    Heck I’m in my 30s and I do that sometimes. I just set up a new Mac after using an iPad Pro for a few months and the number of times I touched the screen is embarrassing.
  - tilt_error 6y ago
    Say no more :) https://youtu.be/hShY6xZWVGE https://youtu.be/hShY6xZWVGE
    - bserge 6y ago
      Ha, voice control was all the rage for a while... before everyone realized it's just impractical
      - jakeva 6y ago
        Maybe you forgot about Siri, Ok Google, Cortana, Alexa?
        bserge 6y ago

bsenftner 6y ago

The web became popular to mainstream culture a few years later. Although I'd been using arpnet for over a decade due to university access, I first encountered a "web browser" while working at Electronic Arts on the yet to be released 3D0 in '93 -'94. However, nobody cared diddly squat about "the web", it was empty or nonsense like usenet forums. We only cared about was DOWNLOADING DOOM! Id software released Doom, it it was available as an "web download link". That was the initial reason everyone at E.A. got exposure to the web, to download Doom.

ghaff 6y ago
I have a 1992 edition of O'Reilly's The Whole Internet. The WWW merits a very short chapter in the vein of there's this new fangled thing that came out of CERN. (But, really, let's talk about Gopher.)
freehunter 6y ago
My dad co-owned a small company in the early 90s and they just got new computers but he convinced the rest of the owners that they needed to invest in serial network equipment “to share files”. In reality they ended up playing multiplayer Doom with it.
conductr 6y ago
It’s kind of like where Bitcoin is at (mid-90s web). Most of general public has heard of it by now, of those using most just came because “get rich quick”, and meanwhile nobody really knows if it’s even useful.
- sollewitt 6y ago
  By the time the web was as old as bitcoin is now, we were already the other side of the dot com boom/bust and Amazon had a market cap of $2.25B. The web changed everything very quickly.

samizdis 6y ago

I remember transitioning from Prestel, where in the mid-80s I played the MMO Shades [1], to the web and then getting more and more despondent as year after year the experience seemed to degrade as everyone and their dog went online. [1] https://www.prestel.org.uk/download.php?cat=15_Prestel&file=Shades-the%20utimate%20adventure%20MUGSept1989.pdf https://www.prestel.org.uk/download.php?cat=15_Prestel&file=... Edit to add: Prestel was an interactive service run by the UK Post Office. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel

vfc1 6y ago

The web is just getting started, I don't see it hitting a stable point before it its 50 years old or so. More and more transactions are made online as opposed to before. More and more jobs are available online, but it's still a small percentage. Imagine when most of everyone's shopping is done online, when half the people work remotely, and when all countries in the world not just the most developed ones have full access to fast internet.

gaudat 6y ago

And now the web is not world-wide anymore thanks to big-tech making censored, cookie-cutter walled gardens to the general public. I forgot the last time I typed 'www.' in an URL. Every friend of mine have their own blog or personal website when I started out on the web around a decade ago. This spirit has largely vanished with the domination of Facebook and other social networks. What we got is remnants of the old web in "old-looking" websites now. Like here.

ghaff 6y ago
Your friends were a tiny slice of the public. I do get the concerns about walled gardens. But very few people had their own blogs or websites. And many of those who did still have them.

mhh__ 6y ago

Thanks Tim https://youtu.be/UMNFehJIi0E https://youtu.be/UMNFehJIi0E

system2 6y ago
Rather bizarre celebration.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago

And to think Al Gore was only 42 then

dang 6y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

stevespang 6y ago

And behold the privacy violating, intrusive, malware inhabited, monopoly ridden POS it has become. From huge corporations to Russian and Chinese hackers - - - the root of all evil is money

annoyingnoob 6y ago

Before the web we had BBSs and computer friends would meet in person gasp.

IanClarke 6y ago
They are famous and it comes up regularly, but younger people won't know about "the Usenet" or Bully Boards (BBS). They were awesome for their time: They had awesome, engaging features, maybe on a "nerd" level O:-), back then not accessible for everyone. Today we have much better ways to interact online, kind of with the whole world and somehow everyone is online, today. Locality has lost on importance, since ways to interact remotely/online became more powerful and also accessible for all. It's really interesting where this leads to in the future. E.g. WFH (work from home, especially emphasized by "Covid"): Companies might outsource development to the lowest COL (cost of living) area in that vein. Also: Everyone is globally connected, better and better, yet somehow more and more "home alone". So interesting, somehow unavoidable and it's open to see where this develops and if we manage to make these developments positive and get the negatives under control for all/most involved.
- annoyingnoob 6y ago
  Yep, the internet is an improvement and it changed the world. We are all better off for it. I suppose the article brought me back to a different time. That original all text green-on-black, terminal-like, view really took me back to the BBS (Bulletin Board System) days. You might not remember but modems were a thing before the internet, I can remember my Dad tying up the house phone for hours while dialed into the mainframe at the office. And the early days of the internet probably looked like a service like Prodigy for a lot of people. Prodigy was a fancy BBS. And everything had to work at dial-up speed. Even Berners-Lee's original pages would have been data-conserving and fast. Its interesting that the user experience in those times felt, and probably was, faster. Our fancy modern graphics take a lot of resources in comparison. While its easy to point to numerous benefits to the modern internet, we've slipped in terms of time to display info on the screen. Modern web apps treat bandwidth and storage as infinite and free resources, its really the opposite of what we used to do and maybe not for the better. I suppose that the key difference is that Berners-Lee's WWW used the benefit of an always-connected network. Where the BBS days were all about temporary network connections. While we use WWW and Internet almost interchangeably, its the always-connected network - the concept of packet switching over circuit switching - that brought the benefit of the WWW. I'm sure in 30 more years we'll have things I can't imagine today, its the power of the network.

known 6y ago

Humanity is indebted to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

spacedcowboy 6y ago

When I set up my first website, you had to email CERN to be put on a list of websites around the world, that was published on their website... I think it was about the 60th (I forget the exact number, it was a long time ago :) website in the UK, serving the “needs” of (ok, playing with tech for) the image processing group in Kings College London’s physics dept while doing my PhD. The server ran on my desktop DECstation 3100, a 16MHz R2000 with a 1024x864 1-bit display named asterix.ph.kcl.ac.uk - Yeah, 1-bit. In the image-processing dept... still, it was more than 10x faster than the microvax that served the rest of the dept! It’s kind of amazing to me, having lived through all the change, that a modern Arm SOC like the $5 Pi-0 would blow away that at-the-time (1989) high-end workstation, in every respect. In the dust. In comparison, the first computer I ever got was the ZX81 (in 1981, so about 8 years earlier) and it had 1K of RAM, came as components that I soldered to the motherboard (I was 11 at the time, soldering was old-hat) and I was more interested in the black-and-white, dial-tuned, portable TV that I could have in my bedroom that came with it :) But to go from that to the DEC 3100 in such a short time was also massive progress.

samstave 6y ago
I love stories of yore like this. I got my first machine in ~1985 or so... I convinced my dad he needed a machine for his business - and then I just played populous and called long distance from Tahoe to a BBS in San Jose to play the pit and trade wars. I got grounded for a month because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad was furious. He yelled at me one time and said "stop wasting your time on the damn computer - it will never do anything for you!" Years later - after a successful time working in Silicon Valley building out many a thing, my dad came to my house and he apologized for yelling at me for "wasting time on the computer" - and I was touched that he remembered that time from when I was 11 and he said that... My first machine was a Tandy 1000 - and I was also calling in to PC-Link (which later became AOL) to chat with strangers....
- bartread 6y ago
  > because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad was furious Blimey. I'm not surprised. In today's money that's $2,239.52. You were like a very early forerunner of those kids running up massive credit card bills on in-app purchases. Great story though: thanks for sharing.

rurban 6y ago

I doubt that this was the first website and webserver. Just the first HTTP server. Previously GOPHER did exist, also with multimedia extensions to view videos and images, and other/better types of webservers, eg. Microcosm, Memex, Xandru, Dexter or esp. Hyper-G via the HTP protocol (Hyper Text Protocol) or just via emacs. Hyper-G servers had link consistency and clients had embedded search. But worse and free was better, Hyper-G and Microcosm were proprietary. First Hyper-G installation around 1989 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220349551_The_Hyper-G_Network_Information_System https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220349551_The_Hyper... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282504095_Analysis_for_the_Overwhelming_Success_of_the_Web_Compared_to_Microcosm_and_Hyper-G_Systems https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282504095_Analysis_...

ghaff 6y ago
By definition, the "web" is HTTP. Of course there were files hosted on servers prior to the WWW. Including direct predecessors such as, as you mention, Gopher. But they weren't the web.
- rurban 6y ago
  Nope, you mix that up with WWW. I browsed the web before CERN published their HTTP server and clients. E.g. the newsgroups were called Internet long before. The Web was the abbrevation of Internet. WWW was the multimedia enriched variant of the web, with a XML format and a state-less server. State-less on purpose, in constrast to the existing stateful servers those days, with proper login and the server keeping each clients state. This didn't scale, so the worse and simplier WWW technology succeeded. Cookies had to be invented to catch up.
  - ratww 6y ago
    Not really, Web has always been the third W on WWW, aka "World Wide Web". The term "WorldWideWeb" was coined by Robert Cailliau, a colleague of Tim Berners-Lee in CERN. I've never seen your definition being used before, even by Gopher or Usenet enthusiasts.

082349872349872 6y ago

Obligatory TimBL (as he was 30 years ago) and V. Cerf pic: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-656d4d361de6a7fc4104cc98e33f4057 https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-656d4d361de6a7fc4104cc...

deleted 6y ago
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heresie-dabord 6y ago

The importance of the WWW for me has been research papers and books, dev tools, and jazz & classical music. Although I use it every day, the WWW has become something that I actively mistrust. There are too many predators, both commercial and espionage. I scrape WWW pages from the terminal and download archives for offline reference. Just to use what TBL conceived, it has been necessary to develop multi-layered defence: router, firewall, dns doh and filters, VPN, firejail, browser extensions. I think it's safe to say that this is not what most users have in mind when they buy a shiny new computer and "connect to the Internet".

roastytoasty 6y ago
Agreed. I am also saddened that there is some things that I was too lazy to download for offline use and is now no longer available online.
OpticalWindows 6y ago
There may be a few sites I don't know about but I wish there was a reputable resource that saved archived information. I think libraries should archive everything on the internet if they haven't already. It would be really neat to give students the ability to surf the web of 2001's ecetera. By archiving the internet I mean everything. Search engine performance on each date, ads, social traffic.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago

And what a mess it is compared to then.

nalekberov 6y ago

The web is very fascinating space for me. Back in university years I started to realize how much powerful is web. One doesn't have to buy a lot of book in order to learn new things. It's just amazing. And yet I am a bit pessimistic about the future of the web, in the beginning we all hoped it will created new space, where we will be able to freely speak and share our thoughts, in fact today's web turns into a space where surveillance has become a standard. The web was created for people, not for capitalists.

krapp 6y ago
The web was created for people, and capitalists are also people.

CTOSian 6y ago

looks like yesterday I used BBS's to outdial to the web :'-) +++ ATZ

hit8run 6y ago

Ah good times. No adblocker needed and a sophisticated audience :D

neatze 6y ago
Just use ublock and no-script add-ons in your browser.
danmg 6y ago
Not that much content either at least on the "web".

papito 6y ago

The Web accelerated everything. The speed of picking up knowledge and general developments has multiplied by who knows how much. The know-how in every single vocation is no longer compartmentalized. A chef comes up with a new trend in an Austin restaurant, a few weeks later it's all over L.A. Thank you for visiting! Please sign my guestbook.

Kye 6y ago
Part of the reason we got a covid-19 vaccine so fast is because researchers posted the genetic sequence of the virus on the web for anyone to download. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/china-releases-genetic-data-new-coronavirus-now-deadly https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/china-re... I can't find much more than that because mainstream search engines increasingly don't return relevant or useful results.

nabla9 6y ago

My first web experience was remote telnet connection into just that workstation in CERN. It was common to allow anonymous telnet logins back then. The protocol was to use the username "anonymous" as a login name and maybe your email address as a password as a courtesy. I experimented a little. My impression was that it was very much like a gopher but not as organized and has less content. So I logged out and forgot about it. Then game Mosaic.

ArtWomb 6y ago

For a glimpse of what discussions looked like at the dawn of the public web ("slow, mostly local connections; a growing accumulation of posts; the absence of surveillance and metrics"), Rhizome has just released a painstaking "emulation" of The Thing BBS net art discussion forum. How ironic that the "last avant garde of the 20th century" should now be enshrined forever by an NEH Digital Humanities grant when it was considered too outre for even modern art museums! “Did We Dream Enough?” THE THING BBS as an Experiment in Social-Cyber Sculpture And with projects like Ruffle, the Rust Flash Player emulator, we can imagine a continuous re-examination of the web's early aesthetics RIP Adobe Flash: Five Takeaways About the Plug-in’s Legacy in Net Art https://hyperallergic.com/609682/rip-adobe-flash-five-takeaways-about-the-plug-ins-legacy-in-net-art/ https://hyperallergic.com/609682/rip-adobe-flash-five-takeaw...

ArtWomb 6y ago
Link: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/dec/16/did-we-dream-enough-the-thing-bbs/ https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/dec/16/did-we-dream-enoug...

forgotmypw17 6y ago

How sad it makes me that this site requires js and new browser to view... It would have been so easy to make it compatible in the spirit of the web.

dcwca 6y ago
The spirit of the web isn’t frozen in time.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I'd say that inclusivity and accessibility are pretty basic cornerstones though.

joelbluminator 6y ago

Anyone remembers "the web is dead" articles by Wired from a few years ago?

tdeck 6y ago

The web was designed for progressive loading, so why does every page on CERN's website seem to have a custom interstitial loading indicator? This is one of those trends that should never have happened.

froh 6y ago

Would it make sense to use this link? Which references December 1990 as the first web http server and http client browser/ editor life in cern? https://timeline.web.cern.ch/worlds-first-browsereditor-website-and-server-go-live-cern https://timeline.web.cern.ch/worlds-first-browsereditor-webs...

jabo 6y ago

Interesting that ffmpeg was started on the 10th anniversary of the web: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25487711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25487711

fortran77 6y ago

I remember when someone walked into my office about 27 years ago (in 1993) and showed me NCSA Mosaic on SunOS. I was mesmerized. And my productivity hasn't been the same since.

severino 6y ago

I find it really exciting to be part of a generation that discovered the internet (which was mostly a synonym for the www and the irc) in the mid-late 90s, as opposed to the current ones who had always internet present in their lives. Back then, at least in my country, internet connections were very scarce, nobody had internet at home and "connecting" to the internet was actually a thing... So you can perfectly remember the first time you got into the internet, which one was the first site you visited, from where, and how you discovered that world that today almost everybody is familiar with.

mr_toad 6y ago
> nobody had internet at home There were no residential ISPs in the early days. You had to work or study somewhere with internet access. And home connectivity was all dial-up. DSL was completely unaffordable. And even then, home computers lacked a TCP/IP stack, so you’d be dialling into a server using something like z-modem, and using that to access the internet.
movedx 6y ago
I'm in the same boat as you. I had to go to my local college when I was 11 to use their Internet. They offered it for free on weekends. There I learned JavaScript and C from the guy who I'd say basically launched my interest and therefore my career into what it is today. I remember downloading "large" (Warzone is 250GB!) files and splitting them up, copying them to multiple floppies disks. Now I've got 1TB in my back pack! Those were the days when websites were just tables... I miss those simple times :P

testfoobar 6y ago

I remember using akebono.Stanford.edu

zeckalpha 6y ago

Wasn’t it back in November?

Seb-C 6y ago

I feel lucky that as a developer I have had the chance to participate in building the web in my lifetime. Of course I am just one person among the millions that builds it, so I am humbled but also very proud of it. I cannot think of a single invention in human's history that federated so many people together as the web, and it is beautiful.

gjvc 6y ago

"this has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS.." If you can spare three and a half minutes (start time set to the relevant point) to watch the video [1]from 1997 below... https://youtu.be/aYT2se94eU0?t=1279 https://youtu.be/aYT2se94eU0?t=1279 ...then you might enjoy the different point of view as discussed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lfyou/alan_kay_in_1997_html_has_gone_back_to_dark_ages/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lfyou/alan_ka... It comes up on HN from time to time, but I thought an alternative source of discussion (second link above) might add something new. [1] if you have never watched this talk completely at least once, give it a shot and you might be very surprised.

shimonabi 6y ago

I remember feeling frustrated in 1997 as a kid when I uploaded an image via FTP and it was displayed all garbled on the web. I emailed the academic network admin and he wrote me back that I have to set the mode to BINARY. :)

tehlike 6y ago

Crazy to think that if I were born just a decade earlier, I would have probably be in a different career. If memory serves my first machine was a rating, then a 120mhz, then p3 800mhz, then amd my dad built, then my first laptop in 2007. Growing up in a developing country, I feel myself lucky. Picked up programming at a very early age, had my first websites (can't remember the order) on virtualave.net/tripod and some regional isp, in addition to serving stuff from my own machine. Learned vb6 and asp, then .net and so on. Crazy ride, loving every minute

MEASSYoucan 6y ago

I hope that the web can get better if it is used creatively and positively. This will require those have it to give and share best practices to those who have not, if that makes sense.

NoPicklez 6y ago

Its honestly incredible, thinking that my father who I still consider to be young. Was born when the web didn't exist. There is nothing that I can think of that comes close to such a huge change.