“On this day 25 years ago the world’s first website went live to the public,” Cara McGoogan reports for The Telegraph. “The site, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was a basic text page with hyperlinked words that connected to other pages.”
“Berners-Lee used the public launch to outline his plan for the service, which would come to dominate life in the twenty-first century,” McGoogan reports. “‘The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system,’ said Berners-Lee on the world’s first public website. ‘The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone.'”
McGoogan reports, “The first step to making that a reality occurred on August 6, 1991, and was hailed with little fanfare when Berners Lee launched the first web page from his NeXT computer at CERN’s headquarters in Geneva.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Twenty-five eventful years! Prost!
Yes, the World Wide Web was created on Steve Jobs’ precursor to the modern Mac (Mac OS X/OS X/macOS).
Visit the world’s first website is here.
SEE ALSO:
Apple Mac OS X forerunner used to create World Wide Web – September 29, 2004
Steve Jobs Comes Home as Apple Buys NeXT – December 20, 1996
Now you can stream 4K movies virtually anywhere, the monopolistic trust of the bought news media has been broken, anyone with a small business can have international exposure for sales…in a mere 25 years.
Just pretty damn cool.
and the first comment posted said “first!”.
How soon after did p0rn sites start to appear?
Almost instantly, although saying that is a bit misleading.
Keep in mind that before the World Wide Web, there were many other protocols on the Internet. Long before the Web, there were plenty of pr0n servers accessible via FTP, Telnet, Usenet, etc… People were even swapping pr0n files via POP email accounts as well as AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Echo, Well, and even AppleLink.
My first exposure to computer pr0n was back in 1982 via an Apple II. Someone else created some graphics and I edited them and then created software to animate them. It was all very crude (in both senses of the word), but quite a hit at my school (at least among us nerds).
Anyway, when CERN published, it really didn’t take long before websites started popping up for pr0n. The reason was that all lot of them were already set up as FTP servers providing access to files. Many of the first web servers were just that… FTP servers with anonymous login credentials that people created single “welcome” pages in HTML that then pointed to and listed the directories that allowed direct access to the files that had already been there.
Early on, there was no real policing of any of this, so it wasn’t uncommon that people were using server space on their school and even work accounts to host image files, sound files, and such.
It wasn’t until about 1995 that business started launching on the Web, and then companies started realizing that they needed a web presence for everything. So shortly after that IP policing started to occur. Meanwhile, bandwidth started skyrocketing as did compression formats, eventually making consumable media more accessible via the Web.
By the late 90s, it was relative low cost to produce and host low-end pr0n, whether it was live webcam stuff or amateur production.
I was doing live video webcasting and had helped launch some of the first online radio stations at the time. I remember speaking to an audience at NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) one year and making some controversial comments on a panel about how pr0n was likely to drive the industry early on, so look at what they’re doing.
In 2001 there was the dot bomb crash, and while it was briefly really difficult to find work in the tech industry, the pr0n industry was still hiring like crazy in this area.
TL;DR: Almost instantly as FTP and other sites adopted the HTTP protocol and whipped up welcome and directory pages for what already existed. About 5 years later, extremely low quality webcam/video stuff started coming online and in about 10 years we were seeing high commercial growth in the area with high quality (HD) video streaming sites coming in about another 5 years.
Be sure to click on the “Browse the first website using the line-mode browser simulator” link for the full visual effect.
http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
This site goes way back.
http://www.zombo.com/
Not only was it done on a NeXt computer it was a spin-off, I seem to remember, of Apple’s HyperCard.
Bill Atkinson, author of HyperCard, said he missed the boat on having a network model. If he had had one, the Web might really have been based on HyperCard.
The man himself: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6ivwDcOY4
World Wide Hypercard!
Remember the first web browsers? Spyglass? Mosaic? Awful and strange.
Mosaic for Mac and Mac web were the first 2 browsers I used in August 1994. I hosted my own website on my school residential network on my Mac Centris 650 (25MHz) using MacHTTP. Over the summer of 1994 the school had installed 2 Ethernet ports in each dorm room, both with a static IP address, so my site was world-accessible. Fun!
Then, in October 1994, the first beta of Netscape Navigator came out, and was better in so many ways than those original browsers. 🙂
it wasn’t long after that MacKeeper started pooping up
Waaait one minute, Al Gore did all the internet stuff fist, he invented it.