I'm also curious because I remember that the first time I used the Internet (not internet, as it is nowadays), I had to buy a paper book with categorized links to websites.
Connecting... Waiting... It was slow, both because of dial-up kbit/s and ping to websites, and every page felt like you were literally sending a request to another part of the planet. It felt like that was actually happening, and it was very different from what we experience now.
But most importantly, there were zero funds/VC in that Internet. Only very niche websites, zero online services, even email was difficult to obtain and felt like a real privilege. Only the fact of being connected made everyone feel not a stranger.
I kind of miss that Internet, but I'm grateful that once I was part of it.
There’s a page “Robert’s comments on Tim’s MIT trip” that says:
“I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water to me, though of course you need to pay the people who provide the information. Your comment already points out some of the bad side-effects of selling per access, or worse, tariffs per type of information or per item! Like: today's newspaper is 10CHF because there is this item in it which everyone wants to know about.”
Interesting too that an article
on the front page the other day was about microtransactions for news.
In 1993, you could refresh the home page of Netscape (Mosaic) every day and it would mention new sites that had been added. That became unmanageable quickly, which is when two dudes from Stanford started a directory.
Has anyone been able to recover the original source code? The README here: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/README.html mentions a src/ directory under the same location but it 404's to me.
Would love to see the source for the original httpd.
Though you can browse and download the latest version 3.0A (1996), there is a directory where they have older versions, but its a bunch of files mixed up with different versions. https://www.w3.org/Daemon/old/
The line mode [1] made me pause. Not because you can do anything too useful (most of the cool links are dead, or telnet) but because it seems like a really cool place to explore, learn, and hack.
No ads, no random tits, nobody trying to convert you to their politics, trying to scam you, or telling you to kill yourself. Just people sharing interesting things.
Really makes me excited for the internet until I close the tab.
It just blew my mind! I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at all, JS was written for manipulating the DOM but I was NOT expecting a cool terminal style with a typing/Matrix-style transition animation from some of the first webpages ever.
My brain even ascribed a CRT distortion effect to it, even though that's not actually happening.
edit: okay, no, I am an idiot. Those pages were made in 2013:
A little later, but I have a key chain from a dealership that has their website advertised on it, they didn't have a domain name so it's advertised as http://123.123.123.123/web.htm
When this was first created, how did people usually navigate back to the previous page? I notice there are no "previous" or "home" links here. Was there a "back" button/key, or would you have to edit the URL directly?
Edit: Answered my own question I think. If you choose the option to browse "using the line-mode browser simulator", you can literally type in "Back" to go back.
We used telnet. There were no graphics per se. Before www the "interactive" internet was gopher and wais and co.
Navigation was moving a cursor around to highlight points of interest, some of which would be links to further stuff or controls to do something like go back or forwards.
Install lynx or links2 (ie text mode browsers) and you'll get the idea.
The vaguely graphic efforts with browsable content that you might recognise before www were the likes of Compuserve. That got you a sort of forum style interface.
It's quite hard to explain just how fast things have moved over the last 40 odd years (I'm 1970 to date - 55). I should also point out that my granddad saw rather a lot of change from 1901 to 1989. To be honest the last 15 odd years are even madder than the previous 25 and that's just my own personal recollection.
This site has a way to experience as it once was. I’m on mobile now, but from what I remember when I tried it, each link opened up a new document window. So the idea of going back wasn’t relevant. You’d simply close the window.
Yeah, I just wrote an edit to my comment actually after I noticed that. It in fact has an explicit Back command you can run; one of the few commands it supports.
In the mid 70's, I was a graduate CS student at USC's Information Sciences Institute. I remember my feeling of awe when I used Arpanet (or was it Darpanet) to log into London and do stuff there. Wow!
> When (s)he has found an overview page which (s)he feels ought to refer to the new data, (s)he can ask the author of that document (who ought to have signed it with a link to his or her mail address) to put in a link.
> By the way, it would be easy in principle for a third party to run over these trees and make indexes of what they find. Its just that noone has done it as far as I know
declaring a website to be "first" introduces a definitional problem.
to put it in terms of a simple example, you need several HTML pages before one of them can link to another, but so far that's just hypertext. then you need pages spread out across plural sites to be able to create a web.
I found it via gopher and wais - I can't remember which one did what, it was a fair few years ago.
I telnetted from my PC to a VAX, then to a X.25 PAD, then onto a Janet system, then to somewhere in the US and then to CERN. Eventually I'd get a menu with a link to the www. I'd then navigate the www with different keystrokes.
www was/is free form links to stuff instead of hierarchical menus. It was an evolution not a revolution and there is no need to invoke "chicken or egg".
so you're saying that gopher was the web. i've heard it said before. if you are scared to discuss a chicken and egg problem, you are exactly who should hear it.
I remember that. A few weeks later ran a script to count all the websites on the Internet.. 324 at that time.
Was your script the very first web crawler or did you just have a list?
I'm also curious because I remember that the first time I used the Internet (not internet, as it is nowadays), I had to buy a paper book with categorized links to websites.
Connecting... Waiting... It was slow, both because of dial-up kbit/s and ping to websites, and every page felt like you were literally sending a request to another part of the planet. It felt like that was actually happening, and it was very different from what we experience now.
But most importantly, there were zero funds/VC in that Internet. Only very niche websites, zero online services, even email was difficult to obtain and felt like a real privilege. Only the fact of being connected made everyone feel not a stranger.
I kind of miss that Internet, but I'm grateful that once I was part of it.
There’s a page “Robert’s comments on Tim’s MIT trip” that says:
“I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water to me, though of course you need to pay the people who provide the information. Your comment already points out some of the bad side-effects of selling per access, or worse, tariffs per type of information or per item! Like: today's newspaper is 10CHF because there is this item in it which everyone wants to know about.”
Interesting too that an article on the front page the other day was about microtransactions for news.
Wow. Which year was it?
In 1993, you could refresh the home page of Netscape (Mosaic) every day and it would mention new sites that had been added. That became unmanageable quickly, which is when two dudes from Stanford started a directory.
The NCSA What's New page!
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/388/21...
Has anyone been able to recover the original source code? The README here: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/README.html mentions a src/ directory under the same location but it 404's to me.
Would love to see the source for the original httpd.
Maybe here you'll find what you are looking for: https://www.w3.org/Daemon/
Though you can browse and download the latest version 3.0A (1996), there is a directory where they have older versions, but its a bunch of files mixed up with different versions. https://www.w3.org/Daemon/old/
The line mode [1] made me pause. Not because you can do anything too useful (most of the cool links are dead, or telnet) but because it seems like a really cool place to explore, learn, and hack.
No ads, no random tits, nobody trying to convert you to their politics, trying to scam you, or telling you to kill yourself. Just people sharing interesting things.
Really makes me excited for the internet until I close the tab.
[1] http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
It just blew my mind! I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at all, JS was written for manipulating the DOM but I was NOT expecting a cool terminal style with a typing/Matrix-style transition animation from some of the first webpages ever.
My brain even ascribed a CRT distortion effect to it, even though that's not actually happening.
edit: okay, no, I am an idiot. Those pages were made in 2013:
https://line-mode.cern.ch/
A little later, but I have a key chain from a dealership that has their website advertised on it, they didn't have a domain name so it's advertised as http://123.123.123.123/web.htm
When this was first created, how did people usually navigate back to the previous page? I notice there are no "previous" or "home" links here. Was there a "back" button/key, or would you have to edit the URL directly?
Edit: Answered my own question I think. If you choose the option to browse "using the line-mode browser simulator", you can literally type in "Back" to go back.
We used telnet. There were no graphics per se. Before www the "interactive" internet was gopher and wais and co.
Navigation was moving a cursor around to highlight points of interest, some of which would be links to further stuff or controls to do something like go back or forwards.
Install lynx or links2 (ie text mode browsers) and you'll get the idea.
The vaguely graphic efforts with browsable content that you might recognise before www were the likes of Compuserve. That got you a sort of forum style interface.
It's quite hard to explain just how fast things have moved over the last 40 odd years (I'm 1970 to date - 55). I should also point out that my granddad saw rather a lot of change from 1901 to 1989. To be honest the last 15 odd years are even madder than the previous 25 and that's just my own personal recollection.
This site has a way to experience as it once was. I’m on mobile now, but from what I remember when I tried it, each link opened up a new document window. So the idea of going back wasn’t relevant. You’d simply close the window.
https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/
Yeah, I just wrote an edit to my comment actually after I noticed that. It in fact has an explicit Back command you can run; one of the few commands it supports.
Related:
CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095429
In the mid 70's, I was a graduate CS student at USC's Information Sciences Institute. I remember my feeling of awe when I used Arpanet (or was it Darpanet) to log into London and do stuff there. Wow!
This is great. I particularly enjoyed this entry in the FAQ about how to find web pages: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/KeepingTrack.html
> When (s)he has found an overview page which (s)he feels ought to refer to the new data, (s)he can ask the author of that document (who ought to have signed it with a link to his or her mail address) to put in a link.
> By the way, it would be easy in principle for a third party to run over these trees and make indexes of what they find. Its just that noone has done it as far as I know
A (1992) copy.
Website about this project: https://first-website.web.cern.ch/
Some previous discussions:
6 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45125239
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177906
declaring a website to be "first" introduces a definitional problem.
to put it in terms of a simple example, you need several HTML pages before one of them can link to another, but so far that's just hypertext. then you need pages spread out across plural sites to be able to create a web.
I found it via gopher and wais - I can't remember which one did what, it was a fair few years ago.
I telnetted from my PC to a VAX, then to a X.25 PAD, then onto a Janet system, then to somewhere in the US and then to CERN. Eventually I'd get a menu with a link to the www. I'd then navigate the www with different keystrokes.
www was/is free form links to stuff instead of hierarchical menus. It was an evolution not a revolution and there is no need to invoke "chicken or egg".
so you're saying that gopher was the web. i've heard it said before. if you are scared to discuss a chicken and egg problem, you are exactly who should hear it.
Banned in UAE (at least on DU)
That's rather sad, its just a museum exhibit about the www, so prohibition might look like a pathetic attempt at revisionism.
What is DU?