11 ms·
The WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release (1991)
- kumarshantanu 15y agoThis story is from 1991. Mentioning this in the title would be helpful.
- mattdeboard 15y agoA year ago there would have been no question this was a joke. Now, I'm not so sure.
- Confusion 15y agoWell, my first thought was: "what hubris is this?", before taking note of the archaic name and the domain name and figuring it was probably an interesting old Usenet post. Adding [1991] would perhaps prevent someone from missing it through a similar line of thought?
- freehunter 15y agoYeah, I saw the name and [google.com] (missing the [groups.] part) and the first comment quoting the revolution... I was bracing myself.
- lotharbot 15y agoit's fairly common to ask for the year to be included in submission titles that are old. It helps clarify for the reader that we're going to see something out of computer history (or general world history) rather than something brand new.
- simonw 15y ago"This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access."
- gpmcadam 15y agoUp there with "one small step...", imo.
- redthrowaway 15y agoFar beyond, in fact. The moon landing, though cool and awesome, really didn't lead to much in the way of technological advancement or societal change. certainly not as much as the web, at any rate.
- spiffistan 15y agoThat took me aback as well. In. Deed.
- zalew 15y agoI just love how I came across this manifesto http://www.pastebin.com/0xXV8k7k http://www.pastebin.com/0xXV8k7k just after the WWW alpha post. (hn link: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3624866 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3624866)
- indiecore 15y agoYeah, this should be on a memorial somewhere. Or at least in one of those "pretty silly in hindsight" quote books.
- famousactress 15y agoWho would have thought that such a short time later it would be the revolution in information access that we take for granted, and the lack of warranty bit that'd we'd be fighting to uphold.
- chc 15y agoFighting to uphold the lack of warranty? What?
- famousactress 15y ago
- shingen 15y agoIt'll never catch on.
- DrCatbox 15y agoIt needs traction and to solve the chicken-and-egg problem. There is not many documents to look at, and to make people look at all these documents you need many people to put up their documents on such a proposed web, and in a special form!
- zalew 15y agoit needs a better name to get recognition. 'double-u double-u double-u' is hard to pronounce.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoIt's actually in the Bible in some languages... Revelation 8:13 has "woe woe woe" which is "wee wee wee" in dutch, which does translate to "double-u double-u double-u"
- zalew 15y agothey better check if it's not something offensive in chinese.
- iamgoat 15y agoI usually say "triple-double-u" when I reference it verbally. I had a project manager long ago that would say dub-dub-dub and it just sounded silly to me.
- Angostura 15y agoBack in the mid 90s a colleague embarked on a (fruitless) attempt to get all the people he knwe to call their Web hosts 'web' as in web.example.com. A shame that he failed, I feel.
- 15y ago
- gonnakillme 15y agowow. Does anyone know where one could get that tarball?
- Maxious 15y agohttp://browsers.evolt.org/?worldwideweb/NeXT http://browsers.evolt.org/?worldwideweb/NeXT Lots of other "classic" browsers also mirrored there!
- scanr 15y agoAnyone know where to get the server "WWWDaemon_0.1.tar.Z"?
- andyjohnson0 15y agoYou could try ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/old/
- obtu 15y agoHere's the oldest so far (1996): ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/old/miniserv/old/webd_4.0B_src.tar.Z
- playeren 15y agoI'm down to '93: ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/httpd/old/WWWDaemon_2.08.tar.Z I would LOVE to find a copy of 0.1
- andyjohnson0 15y agoThere is a change history for httpd here: http://www.w3.org/Daemon/Features.html http://www.w3.org/Daemon/Features.html. Goes back to 0.1, but interestingly jumps from 2.06 to 2.12. If the first couple of years of work on the first web server are missing then that seems to me to be a minor tragedy, given how absolutely vital this technology has since become. It would be instructive to be able to track the development of the server and understand the learning process by comparing versions. I wonder if its worth asking Tim Berners-Lee about this, since he wrote it? http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/#Before http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/#Before
- Achshar 15y agowait, can anyone please tell me the story behind this post? i understand it is about some primitive text browser for web but why (and how) is it on google groups? google wasn't even there at that time. and how can one add a post and date it in the past?
- jaredsohn 15y agoBack in 2001, Google bought the DejaNews archives which contained old Usenet posts and imported them into Google Groups (using the original dates).
- Shark-Snap 15y agoThis was the start of the web. Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web system of hyper-linked pages of information. He then wrote the first tools to help browse this collection of pages. This newsgroup post is the original announcement for the tools he had developed. Google Groups include archives of old newsgroup postings and this story is linking to the original announcement in 1991. See Wikipedia page on History of the WWW for more info. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
- andyjohnson0 15y agoIts a Usenet post from 1991. In 2001 Google bought [1] the usenet archive built by Deja.com, which included that post, and added the archive's contents to Google groups to enable searching Usenet using Google. [1] http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease48.html http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease48.html
- icebraining 15y agoprimitive text browser for web Browser, server and editor. His original view was that everyone would publish from their own machines in a P2P way.
- dexen 15y agoThat `editor' part cannot be stressed enough. It's a shame the PUT and PATCH HTTP methods aren't widely used nor open for use.
- Kilimanjaro 15y ago'also remote indexes to be interrogated for lists of useful documents' Now I know why the home page of most web sites is named index.html
- Shark-Snap 15y agoInitially Tim Berners-Lee wanted to call it 'The Information Mine' - abbreviated to 'TIM'
- harrylove 15y agoThat sounds like Google's mission. "The information. Mine."
- derwildemomo 15y agowhat are you doing? nothing, just creating http, html and a browser and client. that's what i call a "getting things done" attitude.
- a_a_r_o_n 15y agoNewton: can't describe physics effectively, invents calculus. Berners-Lee: can't collaborate effectively with physicists, invents the web.
- zerostar07 15y agoInteresting to note that he has a degree in Physics himself, and the idea was for physicists to collaborate with each other.
- httpsuckslikepg 15y agoI, too, am busy being the worst possible application delivery protocol ever!
- kyberias 15y agoI think you're drunk too!
- Aqueous 15y ago"We also released an iPhone version of the WorldWideWeb Application. Unfortunately, we were turned down by Apple for acceptance into the iTunes store."
- zerostar07 15y agoCareful there. Had Apple bought WWW (It was a NeXT-only application anyway) we would have had a lot more justin biebers.
- phatbyte 15y agoThe web's big bang ?
- cpfohl 15y agoSo cool. I love seeing this sort of history. Thanks for posting!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- tambourine_man 15y agoGoogle demands a login to allow me to read the article on my iPhone. Not the WWW that Tim imagined.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- js2 15y agoThis is because you have an expired google login cookie. It's annoying and is not specific to iOS. Delete that cookie and you can read w/o logging in. On the desktop, I almost always use a Chrome incognito window for Google Groups.
- indiecore 15y agoIt also doesn't let you read it if you block cookies. I use Chromium for Google stuff and Nightly with ghostery/noscript for everything else.
- tambourine_man 15y agoDidn't work. Deleted Cookies, Cache and databases. It still knows who I am and asks for password.
- httpsuckslikepg 15y agoGo fuck yourself, apologist.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- js2 15y agoTo give a taste of how quickly this exploded. This is 1991. By 1995 I was working at a small ISP. The ISP existed only because there was demand to get on the web. I started my masters in 1996 but was then lured away by a job at Cox Interactice Media, a several hundred person division that Cox Enterprises setup just so it could have a web presence. That's just 5 years after this annoucement, and well, we know where it went from there. All for something that didnt exist when I graduated highschool. Try to imagine inventing somthing with that kind of impact that quickly.
- indiecore 15y agoHeh, Cox. In all seriousness though I can only dimly remember a time without the Internet in my house it's changed so much in so little time it's crazy.
- TylerE 15y agoInteresting. What part of Cox's web division in particular? I'm actually working for a small group of newspapers that were spun off of Cox about 3 years ago.
- js2 15y agoCox Interactive Media. The division doesn't exist anymore. At the time it ran the web sites for the media properties (newspapers, TVs, radio stations). http://web.archive.org/web/19991013054542/http://cimedia.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19991013054542/http://cimedia.com...
- charlieok 15y agoOther things that grew more quickly did so afterward, using the web in order to achieve that growth. Each one seems to grow more quickly than the last.
- js2 15y agoSure, and the web couldn't have existed w/o the Internet before it, which took many years to get to where it was in 1991. But it is definitely the Internet's killer app.
- redridingnews 15y agoWhy can't I read this on my iPhone? For some reason, it asks me to log in.
- spinchange 15y agoSome intrepid blogger ought to do a round-up of all the seminal Usenet posts like this. Thinking of Linus announcing Linux, Larry announcing his pagerank/webcrawler, etc... Although, it seems like something like this is probably already out there (?)
- jaylevitt 15y agohttp://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html
- steve-howard 15y ago> "I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series." - azure!randals, June 1982 Well worth the read, thanks!
- jonny_eh 15y agoWhere are the seminal annoucements being made today? HN? Reddit? It can't still be Usenet, right?
- DanBC 15y agoIn this very thread, three hours before you posted: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624657 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624657) But there are bound to be many more really interesting bits buried in Usenet.
- VikingCoder 15y agoHere's my personal story: I distinctly remember a professor showing me a web browser (not Gopher!) before I left for a second-semester and summer co-op, my Sophomore year in college (starting around January/February, and running until August). I graduated High School in May of 1991, so then I was a Freshman in college in August of 1991 (right around when this was posted.) I was a Sophomore in August of 1992, and it would have been right around December of 1992 when I saw the browser, if my memory is correct. I've been trying to figure out if my memory is flawed... And if not, what browser he would have been using. It couldn't have been NCSA Mosaic, because 0.1a wasn't out until June 1993: ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Windows/Archive/MosaicHistory.html Or Netscape Navigator, because 0.9 wasn't out until 1994. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#Release_hist... So, December of 1992, probably not a NeXT (I don't think), certainly an X-Windows system. Probably a Sun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web That leaves Erwise, ViolaWWW... Or maybe my memory is flawed. Maybe I didn't see the graphical WWW browser until after I got back from my co-op, so some time around August of 1993. :( If I remembered the professor's name, I could email him and ask! I wonder how many people saw the WWW before me? If you look at how long people have been web browsing, what percentile am I in? 99.9%? 99.99%? 99.999%? How many nines, damnit! :) Maybe it was a NeXT. I know my school later had NeXT boxes. That would certainly make my remembered timeline more plausible...
- juiceandjuice 15y agoMy boss wrote MidasWWW, a Motif/X based browser for Unix. It was out in November 1992. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidasWWW http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidasWWW http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser > Where does Mosaic fit in? > A: As I understand it, Marc Andreessen at NCSA was shown ViolaWWW by a colleague (David Thompson?) at NCSA. Marc downloaded Midas and tried it out. He and Eric Bina then wrote their own browser for unix from scratch. Later, several other folks at NCSA joined the team to port the idea to Mac and PC. As they did, Tom Bruce at Cornell was writing "Cello" for the PC which came out neck-and-neck with Mosaic on the PC.
- tambourine_man 15y agoThere was a turning point for me, somewhere between the purchase of a 33.6 modem and upgrade from 30 monthly hours to unlimited dial-up, when the Web changed from a curiosity to the best thing ever. The meme back then was that you could go to the Louvre from your home computer. But before those two upgrades it felt like it would be faster and cheeper to just take a plane. I had much more fun with CD-ROMs from computer magazines. The other essential turning point was the discovery that the phone company would only charge you a single pulse from midnight to 6 am. So at 12:01, the horde of nerds would dispute the few available lines of the ISPs to try to get connected. No taximeter, no Moms inadvertently grabbing the phone and disconnecting you. That kind of shaped a whole generation's habits and schedules. At about the same time there was also a change of culture. I remember having to call people to tell them I sent an email a few days ago. When people began answering me the same day, things started to get interesting. And then there was SPAM and we lost that forever :) Or least until Gmail came along and rescued us with its magical bayesian filter and petabytes of data.
- tatsuke95 15y ago>"There was a turning point for me, somewhere between the purchase of a 33.6 modem and upgrade from 30 monthly hours to unlimited dial-up, when the Web changed from a curiosity to the best thing ever." My experience mirrors yours! I paid $279.99 for a 28.8 modem, somewhere around 1995. At that point my internet service went through a local BBS that was charging a rate of $2.00/hour, unless you bought a package of 100 hours, in which case it was $1.00. I remember installing Netscape off two floppies. That was also the time I discovered MUDs. How I did't bankrupt my parents is beyond me. When ICAN.net (later Primus) came to Canada with an unlimited internet plan for $30 bucks, minds were blown. The internet is the technology that fundamentally transformed my life. Love seeing these articles, thanks for the nostalgia.
- harrylove 15y agore: grabbing the phone and disconnecting. I remember that like it was yesterday. God, it was so painful to be in the middle of a download--even just a web page--and have someone pick up the phone. Aaaargh! Then you do the modem 2-step, wait for the lo-fi screaming ghost, and back on the web you would go. People born today will ask, "You had to connect through your phone? And the phone was connected to the wall?"
- xster 15y agoGoogle groups lies! The author was Al Gore!
- Yhippa 15y agoDoes anybody remember "Internet in a Box" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box)? I remember back in the day I was so excited to purchase my own browser software. My how things have changed.
- Nutella2 15y agoI think I still have the box somewhere at home. I should donate it to the Computer History Museum.
- DanielKehoe 15y agoI was writing for NeXTWorld magazine at the time I saw TimBL's newsgroup announcement. I mentioned it to a colleague at the magazine, John Perry Barlow, who emailed his friend Mitch Kapor at EFF, saying "[Kehoe] passed on the following about something called World Wide Web, which sounds rather like Project Xanadu emerging from the Matrix almost without design. This could be cool." Here's the original email (screen grab from my NeXT machine): http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/images/barlow.gif http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/images/barlow.gif I emailed TimBL and told him I'd asked my editors to let my co-editor and I write about it. TimBL was enthusiastic but warned me, "We have to avoid any embarrassment about CERN code being 'given away for free' when developed with European taxpayers' money. We are working on this but don't say anything in print about how one gets hold of the code without checking for latest developments first!" Here's the original email from TimBL: http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/images/timbl.gif http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/images/timbl.gif TimBL had no reason for concern -- my editors decided the story was not newsworthy and we never ran the piece. I was working on a book proposal at the time, titled "Plugging Into the Planet," which introduced the Internet and explained how computer users could get connected to Usenet, Gopher, and WAIS. I added a section on the WWW. Random House, Bantam, and other major publishers turned it down. I was told books about modems didn't sell well. When I saw TimBL's announcement, I felt it was an important project and worthy of notice. Still, I thought that calling it the WorldWideWeb was vainglorious; after all, how worldwide was it really, running on the handful of NeXTs that had Internet connections? It wasn't until John Markoff's December 1993 article in the New York Times describing NCSA Mosaic for Windows that popular interest in the web burgeoned. Even then, there were very few ISPs, modems were slow, and there was no easy way to create and serve web pages. That we now have the web is a testament to both the power of TimBL's vision and the enthusiasm of everyone who encountered it.
- luke_s 15y agoIts a bit off topic, but I am curious about a bit of slang used. John Perry said "... sounds rather like Project Xanadu emerging from the Matrix ... ". I'm familiar with project Xanadu and for a moment I just presumed "the matrix" was a reference to the movie. But then I realized the e-mail was sent in 1991 ... What did he mean by "the matrix"?
- DanielBMarkham 15y agoI remember -- I think it was 1992 -- being one of the first "normal" people on the internet. Got in through a service called Delphi. It had a menu option to use www. The screen came up with white text on a black background. Some words were in reverse -- black text on a white background. I remember thinking "Weird. What would anybody ever use this stuff for?" After all, it wasn't like it was as useful as ftp, telnet, gopher, etc. It was just a bunch of text in a weird format. (Remember there was no mouse then. I imagine you had to tab to get on the links? Never found out, because I couldn't figure out what to do with it.)
- DanielBMarkham 15y agoI remember -- I think it was 1992 -- being one of the first "normal" people on the internet. Got in through a service called Delphi. It had a menu option to use www. The screen came up with white text on a black background. Some words were in reverse -- black text on a white background. I remember thinking "Weird. What would anybody ever use this stuff for?" After all, it wasn't like it was as useful as ftp, telnet, gopher, etc. It was just a bunch of text in a weird format. (Remember there was no mouse then. I imagine you had to tab to get on the links? Never found out, because I couldn't figure out what to do with it.)
- zerostar07 15y agoI have actually used it. What a terrible browser! Every link opens new window? No thanks! and so many menus.. the only good thing is the included editor (i love colored text)... Sorry Tim, i will try ViolaWWW instead which looks more promising. In every case, nothing beats CD-ROMs