8 ms·

World Wide Web (1991)

279 points by geuis 2y ago

Aeroi 2y ago
A good reminder that the technologies that are most transformative in society often times start out appearing deeply complex with a poor UX for the average individual.
niek_pas 2y ago
Look at how fucking fast this page loads. No newsletter banners. No ads. Easy to read, responsive. Why can't more of the web be like this.
- potency 2y ago
  Because expectations have increased since the early 90's and servers cost money.
justsomehnguy 2y ago
Wow, such a marvel of engineering, which is absolutely readable both on my 4k landscape monitor and my portrait smartphone! Does anybody knows, what CSS and JS magic did the guy used here?
- ainiriand 2y ago
  Sarcasm will not be tolerated.
- AlecSchueler 2y ago
  Without joking, it's the only page I've opened in a long long time that was readable on mobile without lots of pinching and scrolling.
  - MrDresden 2y ago
    HN is pretty usuable, except maybe for some of the small touch surfaces.
- Brajeshwar 2y ago
  Every webpages starts out responsive and adaptive by default. :-)
- niemenmaa 2y ago
  Kinda reminds me of this saga (lots of foul language ahead) - http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ - http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ - https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/
- fragmede 2y ago
  You joke, but the first web page came out in 1991. CSS wouldn't come out into 1996, and JavaScript was 1995.
  - Closi 2y ago
    That was the joke, don’t worry we get it ;)
  - zilti 2y ago
    Technically, there was DSSSL already though. It is missed dearly.
    - tannhaeuser 2y ago
      Whoa, that was unexpected. But technically, DSSSL (OpenJade) was used to render pages to print/PDF and never ran as part of a browser stack (unless I've overlooked some stubborn Schemer implementing it in JS or emscripten or sth; but don't tell HN's Lisp fraction to given them ideas ...) Unlike SGML itself, which is mentioned in TBL's docs as the basis for HTML markup. Btw SGML does have its own styling language in link processes which basically just re-uses regular attribute declaration syntax, plus has some explicit state machine representation (aka "links"). But yeah, using a Lisp derivative would've definitely prevented the syntax proliferation that is CSS, its terseness/magic, and habit of re-use of property names for different purposes as a way to sneak in complex layouting features by understated surface syntax changes.
- RGamma 2y ago
  They use the very efficient noop framework. Go check it out here:
throw310822 2y ago
Did someone already make a monument of these words? They would look great carved in stone, with markup and everything: <BODY> <H1>World Wide Web</H1>The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area<A NAME=0 HREF="WhatIs.html"> hypermedia</A> information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.<P> Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including...
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  I wonder about that name attribute. Was it a tabindex equivalent?
  - guessmyname 2y ago
    The name attribute is used to create a named anchor. [1] When using named anchors you can create links to a specific section on a page, instead of letting your viewer scroll around to find what he/she is looking for. Named anchors are called bookmarks in Expression Web. NOTE: Not supported in HTML5. Use the global id attribute instead. Specifies the name of an anchor You can also use the name attribute on the server side to identify the fields in form submits. [2][3] [1] https://www.expression-web-tutorials.com/anchor-tags.html https://www.expression-web-tutorials.com/anchor-tags.html [2] https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_name.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_name.asp [3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1397613 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1397613
    - tambourine_man 2y ago
      Thanks, I remember it was replaced by the ID attribute, but in this case, it is not being used as a named anchor. It seem more like an index.
      - bazoom42 2y ago
        The name attribute can be an arbitrary string, so a number is a valid name. Even if you dont link to the anchor yourself, adding a name will make it possible for others to link to it in the future. I belive anchors were initially designed to be two-way, but it turned out to be more useful to link to headlines rather than links, so links and link targets were seperated.
votiv 2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_bef...
- CPLX 2y ago
  Haven’t thought about IUMA in awhile. That might have been the first site I went down the rabbit hole with.
- jaza 2y ago
  I remember the first time I ever saw the WWW, I think it was 1996, I was in 5th grade (in Australia). The whole class sat down cross-legged in the "computer room", where the school's brand-new Internet connection had just been installed (was probably a single 14.4k modem). The teacher opened Netscape Navigator (on an Apple Macintosh) and clicked on a bookmark. We all sat there spellbound, waiting patiently. About half an hour later, the front page of nasa.gov had finished loading! We all thought it was amazing.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  In 1993 I remember most of the web sites being "How to write HTML." I see one guy there with photo.net -- and you might wonder why he didn't register photo.com. In '93 basically every domain was available, for free (there were no fees yet). Dotnet domains were definitely seen as nerdier and more exotic and rarer beasts than their dotcom brothers and the value of a domain was little understood.
sourcecodeplz 2y ago
Kind of awesome that some of the websites from W3 Servers (https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html) are still online, just a couple though.
- geuis 2y ago
  I also love that the original servers were written in a few lines of C. We've come so far since then, in plus and minus ways.
  - anthk 2y ago
    I've seen web servers written in Maclisp (almost close to Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp) under ITS and PDP 10's. http://up.dfupdate.se/httpd%20html http://up.dfupdate.se/httpd%20html
- datascienced 2y ago
  First there was W3 then Web 2.0 then web3.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  I have found 3 with useful pages but half a dozen which just give a blank page. And a few which are a copy of the 1992 web.
mopsi 2y ago
And even there we can see copyright issues: Information by Subject Music Song lyrics (apparently disabled for copyright reasons) https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overvie...
- tempodox 2y ago
  I still remember how lyrics.wikia.com had to shut down because of copyright issues. It was a site where users could edit and publish song lyrics.
  - wanderingstan 2y ago
    And I’m still mourning the loss of the Online Guitar Archives (OLGA); I still have printouts of all the songs I attempted to learn on guitar.
    - bobvanluijt 2y ago
      Same! That was a sad day
      - mrbluecoat 2y ago
        Similar feelings when Napster (the original cool version) and Grooveshark shut down.
    - gattilorenz 2y ago
      I think most of the OLGA tabs have been moved to Ultimate Guitar (which supposedly compensates authors or has other ways to be copyright-compliant?) and if you look for semi-unknown songs from the 90s you can still find them, in their beautiful notepad-like glory. Up to a few years ago it also didn't have an atrocious interface with plenty of antipatterns. Now, on the other hand...
zarazas 2y ago
Did you post this because of Kneipenquiz from Rocket Beans? :D
- geuis 2y ago
  Nope. Was looking at some old abandonware games from when I was a kid and that got me thinking about the first time I got online on the actual web, not aol or whatever we had back then. Then I remembered that the original site used to be still running and checked if it was active.
lmihaig 2y ago
We should be forever grateful that places like CERN exist, which strive for open science and open source.
- drycabinet 2y ago
  Any examples other than Scientific Linux?
CynicusRex 2y ago
The first website is still more user-friendly, faster, and prettier than most of the Web today. “Web4 should run on LaTeX. The World Wide Web is broken: it is dominated by a handful of websites, nearly everything is financed by ads, bloated tech needlessly slows down surfing, NFTs and blockchain are digital cancer, et cetera. Stop it. Just stop it.” —https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/web4.html https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/web4.html -- POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE)
- anthk 2y ago
  Just use Gemini, or Gopher. Gopher can be read with POSIX netcat+echo+less or gawk. Gemini, with Gawk and OpenSSL: http://git.vgx.fr/gem.awk/ http://git.vgx.fr/gem.awk/ On chess, telnet/netcat to freechess.org 5000. Use awk+nc or gawk to change the replace the chess pieces into UTF8 if you care. No JS, No ads, no nothing. A 486 can still play networked chess, lurk at HN or Reddit via gopher://hngopher.com and gopher://gopherddit.com, read news via gopher://magical.fish (and even translate things from English to French or Spanish) play Nethack/Slashem, emulate the GB, play MP2 and MOD files, use IRC, use chat services against bitlbee.org with an IRC client, telnet to SDF and do crazy things with Emacs (from reading novels to comment on Mastodon/IRC and even play IF with Malyon), also, coding in Elisp. Also, when the Gopher->Gemini bridge gets ready, you will be able to browse UTF8 Gemini and web sites wth just Lynx and a dumb 386 with a relative modernish GNU/Linux, such as a minimal install of Delicate Linux. Add gemini://gemi.dev on top of that and even modern web will be at least article-(text) readable, such as Ars Technica, Wired and The Register. And the bandwidth usage will be good for any user, too. No more data caps with tethered connections, gopher/gemini can be ridiculously small on bw. With gemini://gemi.dev I could read news far away from a city, near train tunnels. The size of a web page was reduced from near a MB to few KBs.
GoofballJones 2y ago
I remember when this first dropped and I was like "this will never catch on. The Internet is using telnet to log into different systems....and FTP...and Usenet...and gopher...and IRC. This World Wide Web is just a gimmick. Hey, I never said I was a visionary.
gjvc 2y ago
erroneous leading space on the first link. splendid.
jak2k 2y ago
We should go back to the roots. The modern web is too bloated.
- simonh 2y ago
  I’m continually astounded by the incredible shoddiness and unfitness for purpose of so many commercial web sites. The more time goes on, you’d think figuring out how to make a functioning web site would become better known, but no. In many ways it gets worse.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  Yes and no. A modern house is ridiculously bloated compared to what my ancestors lived in or even a tent but I wont give it up. You only really need a kitchen and somewhere to take a dump (defecate), separate from the kitchen. The kitchen gets you warmth and shelter from most weather in temperate to arctic climes, shade in warmer climes. The bog need not be "inside" but should be separate for obvious sanitary reasons. Oh and you'll need clean water, something to eat and something to burn for cooking and heat. Tesco and co (supermarkets) can bugger off for being too bloated. I'll be going in with a knife (veg and fruit), spear and bow and arrow (food that moves). Mind you the bow is a bit excessive unless the food that moves is dangerous at close quarters 8) Having said that: FAANG n that really is bloat that could be excised with little of importance lost from the web sigh. How on earth have we found ourselves in a world where "going viral" is a stretch goal and an indicator of success? GOPHER and WAIS and USENET were good enough, back in the day. We still have email for some reason and I can still run my own, from home, but not everyone can. In around 1994 I was asked by my boss to investigate this new web thing. I had a Windows 3.11 PC. I telnetted to my departmental VAX. From that I telnetted to the organization's X.25 PAD. From that I could get from JANET to some exotic American NIST related thing ... then I would hit a GOPHER menu (I think) and after a bit of jiggery pokery I hit the web. I could not really tell the difference, as an end user, between WWW and GOPHER/WAIS. The hyperlinks were simply distributed (through the text) instead of a list of menus. Instead of a page of a menu of links you got text with links in it - all a bit chaotic. Basically, a tree becomes a web. I told the boss it looked a bit better than the menus of G/W but nothing really new. I think I even said to him that the status quo is organized like his hard disc and hence comprehensible but the web is a bit mad and freeform. Do bear in mind that this is in a console, the browser was yet to become mainstream. I'm not an important commentator on internets for obvious reasons! I completely missed the point that free form and a bit mad is exactly what was required for the web to go viral in no uncertain terms.
taulien 2y ago
This page [1] is still "Under Construction", I am wondering, when they will finish it :) [1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Server.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Server.html
BrandoElFollito 2y ago
I had the chance to work at CERN at that time (student, then PhD). I remember navigating on a demo site and being the visionary I am, I thought "ah, cool. Time for lunch". I also mined some 100 bitcoins when they just appeared, out of curiosity. I forgot about the program running and came back to see these ~100 bitcoins. Being the visionary I am, I thought "ah, cool. Let's clean up and time for lunch". Some people are doomed to be executors and only catch up.
- Keyframe 2y ago
  any recent of dem visions?
- webdevver 2y ago
  just out of curiosity, what were you doing before you had lunch today?
  - elderlybanana 2y ago
    Maybe reading about passkeys imminent death on HN?
    - cubefox 2y ago
      Or reading an article about AI being overhyped?
  - linearrust 2y ago
    Given his trajectory, probably was busy in the lab and about to find the cure for cancer. Then lunch happened.
  - elwell 2y ago
    GP was reading about my new LLM startup, remarked how it seemed 'cool' and then went off to lunch. BTW, did I mention I'm looking for investors?
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  That reminds me of my reaction when i first saw Minecraft back in the TIGSource forums: "this looks like a level editor i made a few years ago, it was fun to make levels with it but i doubt anyone is going to buy a level editor" :-P.
Keyframe 2y ago
How's this different than gopher? At least gopher is well-established; This will never catch on.
- chrisco255 2y ago
  There's probably a Usenet thread with this exact text in some archive...
- thomasahle 2y ago
  Gopher also has a much more familiar UI with navigation menus. This "hyperlink" idea is typical ivory tower thinking. Nobody outside of academia will want to use this. And support for images/multimedia? The internet bandwidth this requires will limit it to just a few elite institutions.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- olddustytrail 2y ago
  My exact feelings on seeing Cello browser.
Scarblac 2y ago
I remember finding the WWW in 1993 when it wasn't really more than about a thousand pages at CERN. And I didn't see what was so special about it, and didn't do anything with it... I mean Gopher had archie so it was searchable. And I didn't care much about physics.
ricksunny 2y ago
Does anyone know if TBL was inspired by Vannnevar Bush's Memex proposal at all? Progressively through time we hear references to Memex as 'predicted computers', 'predicted search' 'predicted hypertext', "predicted AI", to which I would add 'predicted tagging' and 'predicted recommendation engines' [note the steady progression of our own technology through time reflected in the above list] And there's still at least one more Memex prediction of something useful that I feel we still haven't produced yet. edit (Ah I see that the wikipedia article for TBL mentions Memex front-and-center, so a pretty trivially identifiable association I guess.)
- BirAdam 2y ago
  According to his own words, he wasn’t aware of Bush, Engelbart, or Nelson when he started working on Enquire, but hypertext more generally was known to him. He became aware of those other men and their work over time and their ideas helped to refine his own.
  - ricksunny 2y ago
    Thanks for that! Incidentally, Vannevar Bush's Oral History 14-part document https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/687 https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/687 seems to have served as an early experiment in prototyping hypertext. It has lots of [X-Ref] items throughout that refer to other relevant parts of the (1000+ page) oral history. I'm not aware of that being a common documentation practice at the time, so I see it as an intentional prototype effort on his part.
mihaaly 2y ago
It is so refreshing seeing content first simple pages from time to time in the cacophony of attention seeking (obstructively injecting themselves) pages with zero or negative (misinformation, misdirection, pure lies and harm) content. It is no fun using the World Wide Web anymore, it is a pure danger zone and struggle. Except exceptions like this one here. One of my sorrow how formally respectable mediums like BBC suck up to this crap trend. Their scrolling articles where your fingers get tired while the emptionally manipulative and exagerating nothing with active shiny presentation goes is something I ever finished, but once I tried. Rubbish! (and unluckily their content too in general, even for the simpler text articles, increasingly, all oppinion random quotes dipped in thick dripping emotional manipulation). Have to read The Economist instead. Not cheap but there the content matter still over the form.
- RetroTechie 2y ago
  Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of useful/interesting websites. Webrings, category-sorted directories with an entry 'portal' & similar. These mostly disappeared as the web's content size exploded, maintaining those directories became too much work, and search engines were just so much easier / better to find what you're looking for. These days: ad & tracking infested bloated trash everywhere, and search engine's usefulness have declined. Putting the few "small web" gems out there in a curated directory, might just be easier than trawling through heaps & heaps of junk (or in near-future: have AI assistant do that for you). A kind of white-listing, if you will.
  - anthk 2y ago
    I remember a text mode BBC site a la https://lite.cnn.io https://lite.cnn.io and https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org. Now it's not any more. Gemini with gemini://gemi.dev/waffle.cgi opening the full BBC URL (with https:// https:// on front) would be the closest to that. Edit: gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/links?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews Try Lagrange in a PC or Android and open this URL.
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    > Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of useful/interesting websites. HN and other link-aggregation forums are more or less a crowdsourced version of that.
adriangrigore 2y ago
I also jokingly refer to https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ShellScript.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ShellScript.html as the first version of my static site generator https://mkws.sh/ https://mkws.sh/
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  "If you know the perl language, then that is a powerful (if otherwise incomprehensible) language with which to hack together a server." Perl was the first language I wrote dynamic websites in around ~1993 so this made me laugh.
  - adriangrigore 2y ago
    Things have sure gotten better now. :D
KingOfCoders 2y ago
I found the syntax interesting /HEPDATA/REAC?P+PBAR list of reactions involving p and pbar (?) https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ServerWriter.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ServerWriter.htm...
tejohnso 2y ago
Interesting comments from the FAQ regarding resource discovery: May...1992... "By the way, it would be easy in principle for a third party to run over these [hyperlink] trees and make indexes of what they find. Its just that noone has done it as far as I know because there isn't yet an indexer which runs over the web directly." ... "In the long term, when there is a really large mass of data out there, with deep interconnections, then there is some really exciting work to be done on automatic algorithms to make multi-level searches." Altavista came out in 1995, Google Search 2 years later.
johnc_ 2y ago
Will never take off.
marstall 2y ago
"there is no 'top' to the web" <= words that were mind blowing to me at the time
linearrust 2y ago
No blinking neon text that could send a blind man into an uncontrolled violent seizure?
simonw 2y ago
It would be neat to catch up on what all of the people listed on https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/People.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/People.html have been doing for the last thirty years. I bet they are an interesting bunch!
tomxor 2y ago
I was hoping this was still being served on the same Next Cube with the "do not power down!!" label, but the HTTP headers strongly suggest not. Maybe it's pointlessly romantic but I like the idea of machines and software continuing to perform their job well past their life expectancy. Voyager 1 has to be the most celebrated example. Maybe it's because it makes me care more about crafting things if they are a little less ephemeral than the modern software churn would make us believe.
- lokimedes 2y ago
  Last time (~2012) I saw that machine, it was exhibited at the CERN Computing Center lobby. Its sibling, Tim’s workstation was exhibited at CERN’s public museum. Both long disconnected.
twilightzone 2y ago
Even works in reader mode.
pbd 2y ago
wow. looks cool.
ape4 2y ago
No rush, but maybe somebody could fix this stray tag at the end <A NAME=49 HREF="...">anonymous FTP</A> , etc.</A>
dailykoder 2y ago
>You can try the simple line mode browser by telnetting to info.cern.ch (no user or password. From UK JANET, use the Gateway). doen't work for me :(
- jpcfl 2y ago
  Sad. Here's a simulator: http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
- xeromal 2y ago
  I just tried it too. lol
layer8 2y ago
From the news link, this is actually from November 1992.
flenserboy 2y ago
At the beginning of that Fall term one of my classmates pulled up next to me while I was working on a NeXT box in our lab. He had me pull up an app he'd had a hand in working on over his summer in Switzerland. "Check it out — this is going to be great. So much better than Gopher," he said. After following a few links I replied, "It's nice, but doesn't provide much more than Gopher right now." "No — but it will." It was fun to be able to see things in the earliest days of the web, & to see how it grew. Never would have guessed at the time that the browser would become the centerpiece of most people's computer use.
- smm11 2y ago
  I remember the first day we started Mosaic on a work computer, then looked around at Gopher pages.
peterbmarks 2y ago
I remember having an O'Reilly book titled "The Whole Internet". Hilarious concept. Gopher was pretty cool at the time.
mhandley 2y ago
I upgraded the UCL CS webserver to CERN/3.0 (the last CERN httpd release) running on a Sun Sparcstation 10 back in 1994, and it has been in production use ever since. The hardware got replaced at least once (our sysadmin has a large pile of spare mid-1990s Sparc hardware), and the NFS server storing the data has changed more than once, but it's the same software install still running on 1990s Sun hardware. It needed some minor patches for Y2K, but nothing in the 24 years since. Will be 30 years this summer. Needless to say as it predates SSL, it's no longer our primary server, but it does still serve everyone's home pages. % nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80 HEAD /staff/M.Handley/ HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 22:06:54 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 9973 Last-Modified: Thu, 07 Dec 2023 13:26:26 GMT
- MaintenanceMode 2y ago
  That's so amazing. That Sun sparc 10 was a beast of a machine. I had one running until 2020. It was seemingly unstoppable. It broke my heart to send it off to recycling, it's weird being emotional about a computer. It had been serving web pages (on-and-off) since 1997.
aidendara7790 2y ago
[dead]

279 points by geuis 2y ago

A good reminder that the technologies that are most transformative in society often times start out appearing deeply complex with a poor UX for the average individual.

niek_pas 2y ago

Look at how fucking fast this page loads. No newsletter banners. No ads. Easy to read, responsive. Why can't more of the web be like this.

potency 2y ago
Because expectations have increased since the early 90's and servers cost money.

justsomehnguy 2y ago

Wow, such a marvel of engineering, which is absolutely readable both on my 4k landscape monitor and my portrait smartphone! Does anybody knows, what CSS and JS magic did the guy used here?

ainiriand 2y ago
Sarcasm will not be tolerated.
AlecSchueler 2y ago
Without joking, it's the only page I've opened in a long long time that was readable on mobile without lots of pinching and scrolling.
- MrDresden 2y ago
  HN is pretty usuable, except maybe for some of the small touch surfaces.
Brajeshwar 2y ago
Every webpages starts out responsive and adaptive by default. :-)
niemenmaa 2y ago
Kinda reminds me of this saga (lots of foul language ahead) - http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ - http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ - https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/
fragmede 2y ago
You joke, but the first web page came out in 1991. CSS wouldn't come out into 1996, and JavaScript was 1995.
- Closi 2y ago
  That was the joke, don’t worry we get it ;)
- zilti 2y ago
  Technically, there was DSSSL already though. It is missed dearly.
  - tannhaeuser 2y ago
    Whoa, that was unexpected. But technically, DSSSL (OpenJade) was used to render pages to print/PDF and never ran as part of a browser stack (unless I've overlooked some stubborn Schemer implementing it in JS or emscripten or sth; but don't tell HN's Lisp fraction to given them ideas ...) Unlike SGML itself, which is mentioned in TBL's docs as the basis for HTML markup. Btw SGML does have its own styling language in link processes which basically just re-uses regular attribute declaration syntax, plus has some explicit state machine representation (aka "links"). But yeah, using a Lisp derivative would've definitely prevented the syntax proliferation that is CSS, its terseness/magic, and habit of re-use of property names for different purposes as a way to sneak in complex layouting features by understated surface syntax changes.
RGamma 2y ago
They use the very efficient noop framework. Go check it out here:

throw310822 2y ago

Did someone already make a monument of these words? They would look great carved in stone, with markup and everything: <BODY> <H1>World Wide Web</H1>The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area<A NAME=0 HREF="WhatIs.html"> hypermedia</A> information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.<P> Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including...

tambourine_man 2y ago
I wonder about that name attribute. Was it a tabindex equivalent?
- guessmyname 2y ago
  The name attribute is used to create a named anchor. [1] When using named anchors you can create links to a specific section on a page, instead of letting your viewer scroll around to find what he/she is looking for. Named anchors are called bookmarks in Expression Web. NOTE: Not supported in HTML5. Use the global id attribute instead. Specifies the name of an anchor You can also use the name attribute on the server side to identify the fields in form submits. [2][3] [1] https://www.expression-web-tutorials.com/anchor-tags.html https://www.expression-web-tutorials.com/anchor-tags.html [2] https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_name.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_name.asp [3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1397613 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1397613
  - tambourine_man 2y ago
    Thanks, I remember it was replaced by the ID attribute, but in this case, it is not being used as a named anchor. It seem more like an index.
    - bazoom42 2y ago
      The name attribute can be an arbitrary string, so a number is a valid name. Even if you dont link to the anchor yourself, adding a name will make it possible for others to link to it in the future. I belive anchors were initially designed to be two-way, but it turned out to be more useful to link to headlines rather than links, so links and link targets were seperated.

votiv 2y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_bef...

CPLX 2y ago
Haven’t thought about IUMA in awhile. That might have been the first site I went down the rabbit hole with.
jaza 2y ago
I remember the first time I ever saw the WWW, I think it was 1996, I was in 5th grade (in Australia). The whole class sat down cross-legged in the "computer room", where the school's brand-new Internet connection had just been installed (was probably a single 14.4k modem). The teacher opened Netscape Navigator (on an Apple Macintosh) and clicked on a bookmark. We all sat there spellbound, waiting patiently. About half an hour later, the front page of nasa.gov had finished loading! We all thought it was amazing.
qingcharles 2y ago
In 1993 I remember most of the web sites being "How to write HTML." I see one guy there with photo.net -- and you might wonder why he didn't register photo.com. In '93 basically every domain was available, for free (there were no fees yet). Dotnet domains were definitely seen as nerdier and more exotic and rarer beasts than their dotcom brothers and the value of a domain was little understood.

sourcecodeplz 2y ago

Kind of awesome that some of the websites from W3 Servers (https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html) are still online, just a couple though.

geuis 2y ago
I also love that the original servers were written in a few lines of C. We've come so far since then, in plus and minus ways.
- anthk 2y ago
  I've seen web servers written in Maclisp (almost close to Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp) under ITS and PDP 10's. http://up.dfupdate.se/httpd%20html http://up.dfupdate.se/httpd%20html
datascienced 2y ago
First there was W3 then Web 2.0 then web3.
pasc1878 2y ago
I have found 3 with useful pages but half a dozen which just give a blank page. And a few which are a copy of the 1992 web.

mopsi 2y ago

And even there we can see copyright issues: Information by Subject Music Song lyrics (apparently disabled for copyright reasons) https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overvie...

tempodox 2y ago
I still remember how lyrics.wikia.com had to shut down because of copyright issues. It was a site where users could edit and publish song lyrics.
- wanderingstan 2y ago
  And I’m still mourning the loss of the Online Guitar Archives (OLGA); I still have printouts of all the songs I attempted to learn on guitar.
  - bobvanluijt 2y ago
    Same! That was a sad day
    - mrbluecoat 2y ago
      Similar feelings when Napster (the original cool version) and Grooveshark shut down.
  - gattilorenz 2y ago
    I think most of the OLGA tabs have been moved to Ultimate Guitar (which supposedly compensates authors or has other ways to be copyright-compliant?) and if you look for semi-unknown songs from the 90s you can still find them, in their beautiful notepad-like glory. Up to a few years ago it also didn't have an atrocious interface with plenty of antipatterns. Now, on the other hand...

zarazas 2y ago

Did you post this because of Kneipenquiz from Rocket Beans? :D

geuis 2y ago
Nope. Was looking at some old abandonware games from when I was a kid and that got me thinking about the first time I got online on the actual web, not aol or whatever we had back then. Then I remembered that the original site used to be still running and checked if it was active.

lmihaig 2y ago

We should be forever grateful that places like CERN exist, which strive for open science and open source.

drycabinet 2y ago
Any examples other than Scientific Linux?

CynicusRex 2y ago

The first website is still more user-friendly, faster, and prettier than most of the Web today. “Web4 should run on LaTeX. The World Wide Web is broken: it is dominated by a handful of websites, nearly everything is financed by ads, bloated tech needlessly slows down surfing, NFTs and blockchain are digital cancer, et cetera. Stop it. Just stop it.” —https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/web4.html https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/web4.html -- POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE)

anthk 2y ago
Just use Gemini, or Gopher. Gopher can be read with POSIX netcat+echo+less or gawk. Gemini, with Gawk and OpenSSL: http://git.vgx.fr/gem.awk/ http://git.vgx.fr/gem.awk/ On chess, telnet/netcat to freechess.org 5000. Use awk+nc or gawk to change the replace the chess pieces into UTF8 if you care. No JS, No ads, no nothing. A 486 can still play networked chess, lurk at HN or Reddit via gopher://hngopher.com and gopher://gopherddit.com, read news via gopher://magical.fish (and even translate things from English to French or Spanish) play Nethack/Slashem, emulate the GB, play MP2 and MOD files, use IRC, use chat services against bitlbee.org with an IRC client, telnet to SDF and do crazy things with Emacs (from reading novels to comment on Mastodon/IRC and even play IF with Malyon), also, coding in Elisp. Also, when the Gopher->Gemini bridge gets ready, you will be able to browse UTF8 Gemini and web sites wth just Lynx and a dumb 386 with a relative modernish GNU/Linux, such as a minimal install of Delicate Linux. Add gemini://gemi.dev on top of that and even modern web will be at least article-(text) readable, such as Ars Technica, Wired and The Register. And the bandwidth usage will be good for any user, too. No more data caps with tethered connections, gopher/gemini can be ridiculously small on bw. With gemini://gemi.dev I could read news far away from a city, near train tunnels. The size of a web page was reduced from near a MB to few KBs.

GoofballJones 2y ago

I remember when this first dropped and I was like "this will never catch on. The Internet is using telnet to log into different systems....and FTP...and Usenet...and gopher...and IRC. This World Wide Web is just a gimmick. Hey, I never said I was a visionary.

gjvc 2y ago

erroneous leading space on the first link. splendid.

jak2k 2y ago

We should go back to the roots. The modern web is too bloated.

simonh 2y ago
I’m continually astounded by the incredible shoddiness and unfitness for purpose of so many commercial web sites. The more time goes on, you’d think figuring out how to make a functioning web site would become better known, but no. In many ways it gets worse.
gerdesj 2y ago
Yes and no. A modern house is ridiculously bloated compared to what my ancestors lived in or even a tent but I wont give it up. You only really need a kitchen and somewhere to take a dump (defecate), separate from the kitchen. The kitchen gets you warmth and shelter from most weather in temperate to arctic climes, shade in warmer climes. The bog need not be "inside" but should be separate for obvious sanitary reasons. Oh and you'll need clean water, something to eat and something to burn for cooking and heat. Tesco and co (supermarkets) can bugger off for being too bloated. I'll be going in with a knife (veg and fruit), spear and bow and arrow (food that moves). Mind you the bow is a bit excessive unless the food that moves is dangerous at close quarters 8) Having said that: FAANG n that really is bloat that could be excised with little of importance lost from the web sigh. How on earth have we found ourselves in a world where "going viral" is a stretch goal and an indicator of success? GOPHER and WAIS and USENET were good enough, back in the day. We still have email for some reason and I can still run my own, from home, but not everyone can. In around 1994 I was asked by my boss to investigate this new web thing. I had a Windows 3.11 PC. I telnetted to my departmental VAX. From that I telnetted to the organization's X.25 PAD. From that I could get from JANET to some exotic American NIST related thing ... then I would hit a GOPHER menu (I think) and after a bit of jiggery pokery I hit the web. I could not really tell the difference, as an end user, between WWW and GOPHER/WAIS. The hyperlinks were simply distributed (through the text) instead of a list of menus. Instead of a page of a menu of links you got text with links in it - all a bit chaotic. Basically, a tree becomes a web. I told the boss it looked a bit better than the menus of G/W but nothing really new. I think I even said to him that the status quo is organized like his hard disc and hence comprehensible but the web is a bit mad and freeform. Do bear in mind that this is in a console, the browser was yet to become mainstream. I'm not an important commentator on internets for obvious reasons! I completely missed the point that free form and a bit mad is exactly what was required for the web to go viral in no uncertain terms.

taulien 2y ago

This page [1] is still "Under Construction", I am wondering, when they will finish it :) [1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Server.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Server.html

BrandoElFollito 2y ago

I had the chance to work at CERN at that time (student, then PhD). I remember navigating on a demo site and being the visionary I am, I thought "ah, cool. Time for lunch". I also mined some 100 bitcoins when they just appeared, out of curiosity. I forgot about the program running and came back to see these ~100 bitcoins. Being the visionary I am, I thought "ah, cool. Let's clean up and time for lunch". Some people are doomed to be executors and only catch up.

Keyframe 2y ago
any recent of dem visions?
webdevver 2y ago
just out of curiosity, what were you doing before you had lunch today?
- elderlybanana 2y ago
  Maybe reading about passkeys imminent death on HN?
  - cubefox 2y ago
    Or reading an article about AI being overhyped?
- linearrust 2y ago
  Given his trajectory, probably was busy in the lab and about to find the cure for cancer. Then lunch happened.
- elwell 2y ago
  GP was reading about my new LLM startup, remarked how it seemed 'cool' and then went off to lunch. BTW, did I mention I'm looking for investors?
badsectoracula 2y ago
That reminds me of my reaction when i first saw Minecraft back in the TIGSource forums: "this looks like a level editor i made a few years ago, it was fun to make levels with it but i doubt anyone is going to buy a level editor" :-P.

Keyframe 2y ago

How's this different than gopher? At least gopher is well-established; This will never catch on.

chrisco255 2y ago
There's probably a Usenet thread with this exact text in some archive...
thomasahle 2y ago
Gopher also has a much more familiar UI with navigation menus. This "hyperlink" idea is typical ivory tower thinking. Nobody outside of academia will want to use this. And support for images/multimedia? The internet bandwidth this requires will limit it to just a few elite institutions.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
olddustytrail 2y ago
My exact feelings on seeing Cello browser.

Scarblac 2y ago

I remember finding the WWW in 1993 when it wasn't really more than about a thousand pages at CERN. And I didn't see what was so special about it, and didn't do anything with it... I mean Gopher had archie so it was searchable. And I didn't care much about physics.

ricksunny 2y ago

Does anyone know if TBL was inspired by Vannnevar Bush's Memex proposal at all? Progressively through time we hear references to Memex as 'predicted computers', 'predicted search' 'predicted hypertext', "predicted AI", to which I would add 'predicted tagging' and 'predicted recommendation engines' [note the steady progression of our own technology through time reflected in the above list] And there's still at least one more Memex prediction of something useful that I feel we still haven't produced yet. edit (Ah I see that the wikipedia article for TBL mentions Memex front-and-center, so a pretty trivially identifiable association I guess.)

BirAdam 2y ago
According to his own words, he wasn’t aware of Bush, Engelbart, or Nelson when he started working on Enquire, but hypertext more generally was known to him. He became aware of those other men and their work over time and their ideas helped to refine his own.
- ricksunny 2y ago
  Thanks for that! Incidentally, Vannevar Bush's Oral History 14-part document https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/687 https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/687 seems to have served as an early experiment in prototyping hypertext. It has lots of [X-Ref] items throughout that refer to other relevant parts of the (1000+ page) oral history. I'm not aware of that being a common documentation practice at the time, so I see it as an intentional prototype effort on his part.

mihaaly 2y ago

It is so refreshing seeing content first simple pages from time to time in the cacophony of attention seeking (obstructively injecting themselves) pages with zero or negative (misinformation, misdirection, pure lies and harm) content. It is no fun using the World Wide Web anymore, it is a pure danger zone and struggle. Except exceptions like this one here. One of my sorrow how formally respectable mediums like BBC suck up to this crap trend. Their scrolling articles where your fingers get tired while the emptionally manipulative and exagerating nothing with active shiny presentation goes is something I ever finished, but once I tried. Rubbish! (and unluckily their content too in general, even for the simpler text articles, increasingly, all oppinion random quotes dipped in thick dripping emotional manipulation). Have to read The Economist instead. Not cheap but there the content matter still over the form.

RetroTechie 2y ago
Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of useful/interesting websites. Webrings, category-sorted directories with an entry 'portal' & similar. These mostly disappeared as the web's content size exploded, maintaining those directories became too much work, and search engines were just so much easier / better to find what you're looking for. These days: ad & tracking infested bloated trash everywhere, and search engine's usefulness have declined. Putting the few "small web" gems out there in a curated directory, might just be easier than trawling through heaps & heaps of junk (or in near-future: have AI assistant do that for you). A kind of white-listing, if you will.
- anthk 2y ago
  I remember a text mode BBC site a la https://lite.cnn.io https://lite.cnn.io and https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org. Now it's not any more. Gemini with gemini://gemi.dev/waffle.cgi opening the full BBC URL (with https:// https:// on front) would be the closest to that. Edit: gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/links?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews Try Lagrange in a PC or Android and open this URL.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  > Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of useful/interesting websites. HN and other link-aggregation forums are more or less a crowdsourced version of that.

adriangrigore 2y ago

I also jokingly refer to https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ShellScript.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ShellScript.html as the first version of my static site generator https://mkws.sh/ https://mkws.sh/

KingOfCoders 2y ago
"If you know the perl language, then that is a powerful (if otherwise incomprehensible) language with which to hack together a server." Perl was the first language I wrote dynamic websites in around ~1993 so this made me laugh.
- adriangrigore 2y ago
  Things have sure gotten better now. :D

KingOfCoders 2y ago

I found the syntax interesting /HEPDATA/REAC?P+PBAR list of reactions involving p and pbar (?) https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ServerWriter.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ServerWriter.htm...

tejohnso 2y ago

Interesting comments from the FAQ regarding resource discovery: May...1992... "By the way, it would be easy in principle for a third party to run over these [hyperlink] trees and make indexes of what they find. Its just that noone has done it as far as I know because there isn't yet an indexer which runs over the web directly." ... "In the long term, when there is a really large mass of data out there, with deep interconnections, then there is some really exciting work to be done on automatic algorithms to make multi-level searches." Altavista came out in 1995, Google Search 2 years later.

johnc_ 2y ago

Will never take off.

marstall 2y ago

"there is no 'top' to the web" <= words that were mind blowing to me at the time

linearrust 2y ago

No blinking neon text that could send a blind man into an uncontrolled violent seizure?

simonw 2y ago

It would be neat to catch up on what all of the people listed on https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/People.html https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/People.html have been doing for the last thirty years. I bet they are an interesting bunch!

tomxor 2y ago

I was hoping this was still being served on the same Next Cube with the "do not power down!!" label, but the HTTP headers strongly suggest not. Maybe it's pointlessly romantic but I like the idea of machines and software continuing to perform their job well past their life expectancy. Voyager 1 has to be the most celebrated example. Maybe it's because it makes me care more about crafting things if they are a little less ephemeral than the modern software churn would make us believe.

lokimedes 2y ago
Last time (~2012) I saw that machine, it was exhibited at the CERN Computing Center lobby. Its sibling, Tim’s workstation was exhibited at CERN’s public museum. Both long disconnected.

twilightzone 2y ago

Even works in reader mode.

pbd 2y ago

wow. looks cool.

ape4 2y ago

No rush, but maybe somebody could fix this stray tag at the end <A NAME=49 HREF="...">anonymous FTP</A> , etc.</A>

dailykoder 2y ago

>You can try the simple line mode browser by telnetting to info.cern.ch (no user or password. From UK JANET, use the Gateway). doen't work for me :(

jpcfl 2y ago
Sad. Here's a simulator: http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
xeromal 2y ago
I just tried it too. lol

layer8 2y ago

From the news link, this is actually from November 1992.

flenserboy 2y ago

At the beginning of that Fall term one of my classmates pulled up next to me while I was working on a NeXT box in our lab. He had me pull up an app he'd had a hand in working on over his summer in Switzerland. "Check it out — this is going to be great. So much better than Gopher," he said. After following a few links I replied, "It's nice, but doesn't provide much more than Gopher right now." "No — but it will." It was fun to be able to see things in the earliest days of the web, & to see how it grew. Never would have guessed at the time that the browser would become the centerpiece of most people's computer use.

smm11 2y ago
I remember the first day we started Mosaic on a work computer, then looked around at Gopher pages.

peterbmarks 2y ago

I remember having an O'Reilly book titled "The Whole Internet". Hilarious concept. Gopher was pretty cool at the time.

mhandley 2y ago

I upgraded the UCL CS webserver to CERN/3.0 (the last CERN httpd release) running on a Sun Sparcstation 10 back in 1994, and it has been in production use ever since. The hardware got replaced at least once (our sysadmin has a large pile of spare mid-1990s Sparc hardware), and the NFS server storing the data has changed more than once, but it's the same software install still running on 1990s Sun hardware. It needed some minor patches for Y2K, but nothing in the 24 years since. Will be 30 years this summer. Needless to say as it predates SSL, it's no longer our primary server, but it does still serve everyone's home pages. % nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80 HEAD /staff/M.Handley/ HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 22:06:54 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 9973 Last-Modified: Thu, 07 Dec 2023 13:26:26 GMT

MaintenanceMode 2y ago
That's so amazing. That Sun sparc 10 was a beast of a machine. I had one running until 2020. It was seemingly unstoppable. It broke my heart to send it off to recycling, it's weird being emotional about a computer. It had been serving web pages (on-and-off) since 1997.

aidendara7790 2y ago

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