Twenty years ago today, the organization that created the World Wide Web made its underlying technology available to everyone on a royalty-free basis. To commemorate that occasion, the very first website is now back online at its original URL.
It's crashed.
It worked here a minute ago.
Imagine, you could fit a list of all available servers on a single A4 sheet of paper if you printed it out.
Not merely did it work, but it's bloody fast. None of that graphics rubbish, but it's got all the info.
Andy
Concur with its speed. Wondered if it had all been cached by Virgin?
Does it still work with current browsers?
Brian
I was using the internet before that and there were many other ways to get data then. Im not so sure its been a good invention myself. Its both made it all very complex to keep going but also dumbed a lot of things down for many.
Brian
I liked Gopher.
The page source is 73 lines of html, with no links or images called directly from the page while loading. Call it about 2KBytes at most. It'd even be fast on dialup, which is what it was written for.
Yes it's a very simple page, using only a very few basic commands. Iy and the pages it links to are possibly the only pages currently on the web guaranteed to work with *any* browser, even text mode only ones.
Well I suppose there was email and usenet back then, and a bit of ftp. And 2Mbps international circuits considered fast.
We didn't have Goper in my day! .-)
Of course.
Its the reverse which ain't true.. Fire up mosaic and watch it vomit on a rich diet of flash, javascript and cookies.
Well in your case not obviously :-)
dumbing it down for many is why its all so cheap now, Brian.
shudder...
yep. In fact the first international link we had here was IIRC 64k to EUnet in Holland.
I THINK they had 128k to the USA...
we were distributing mail/usenet over banks of UUCP modems for many years..
It's taken for granted by many people and made them lazy. For others it's freed up time and allows them to think/invent/develop even more extraordinary ideas.
Don't forget WAIS and Gopher, the universities had their library catalogs/indexes "online" but you could search them very easily.
2400 bps dialup was fast... My first modem was 300 bps or 1200/75.
I'm not on Virgin. I suspect it's just there's so little data.
Andy
Before your time, eh, young'un? ;-)
And Archie. And Veronica. I remember graduating from bulletin boards to Compuserve (still no Internet let alone web) and revelling in the free software. My email at Compuserve was a waste though since nobody I knew could send me stuff.
Another Dave
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