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...
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> You only really need a kitchen and somewhere to take a dump (defecate), separate from the kitchen
Completely off-topic, but that reminds me of when I went hunting for my first apartment as a broke grad student. One of the places I viewed consisted of (only) a tiny living room and a tinier kitchen. The toilet was in the kitchen, sandwiched between the stove and sink. The only countertop area was a swing-up board above the toilet. Must have sucked if you had to take a dump in the middle of preparing dinner.
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.
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.
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.
I, too, mined some bitcoins when it first appeared. My computer at the time was housed in a case of plywood that I'd made.
I wonder if my crappy computer from over 20 years ago has at least a Bitcoin in it?
Well, time for qat now. Will dig it out later.
At that time you even had bitcoin faucets that gave you 0.5-1-5 btc to play around. Or you could just run a miner on your gpu and get 50btc if you ran it for a few days or so - a ton of people probably have those on some partition on an old laptop or sth.
Yes, but we know where those coins are now: in circulation. And we have a good grasp how many that is and how many could possibly on on those shelved laptops. It is literally how every coin in circulation was minted as there is no central party, only your peer devices.
LMAO. I have about 150 Bitcoins sitting on an old hard drive at the bottom of the local dump. I guess someone would try to dig them up if it ever hits a million, but doubtful they could recover them much less unlock them.
Oh my. Same here. I mined quite a few bitcoins on a friend’s PC a long time ago. Then we tried to do something with them but you couldn’t even buy a beer. So we forgot about the bitcoins and the disk is probably on a trash heap somewhere now.
Reminds me of the all-time classic (now) HN discussion on Dropbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 as I got older I realized that, you can never ever hope to choose what will be successful or important, and that is true down to the most seemingly small action you can make. The world is simply too complex and interdependent for that.
I only mined around 1 BT when they were "worth" about £5 and then lost the wallet because I ran out of floppies for my transfer of data from old to new PC or I forgot about it (which is more likely).
I thought the www looked a bit mad and disorganized when I first telnetted to it via the US from UK.
I too am similarly gifted. Back in the usenet days a group I was on received its first spam. There was some discussion about whether this type of thing would get out of control. I confidently proclaimed that there was no way spam would ever be more than a minor nuisance.
My reaction when I first heard of the concept of a "wiki" where everyone is allowed to edit some post (curiously before I heard about Wikipedia): I thought such a system would immediately be ruined by vandalism. It didn't occur to me that there may be way more people who undo vandalism than there are vandals.
Or when I first heard about Twitter. My immediate reaction was: "I'm unusually open to wacky Web 2.0 ideas, but even I have to admit you can't say anything of substance in just 140 characters." And indeed, looking up some random tweets seemed to confirm this suspicion. Interestingly, this wasn't just my reaction. A lot of us "tech enthusiasts" had this opinion about Twitter.
> My reaction when I first heard of the concept of a "wiki" where everyone is allowed to edit some post (curiously before I heard about Wikipedia): I thought such a system would immediately be ruined
There are people who think that today, despite well-known existence proofs we have to the contrary.
I mean a lot of internet places have been destroyed by vandalism and upkeep costs, what were seeing us just survivorship bias and survival of the fittest.
I'd disagree, they require a massive amount of moderation and clean up to keep running. The default state is ruined and only by herculean effort is it usable by others.
It's like a park in a high drug use area. Quite often they are ruined, and only by massive expenditure of effort are is it even near safe.
Its 1992. A friend of mine has asked me to meet with someone, to discuss the idea of 'selling things through the web'. I didn't like the idea - "this is not what the Internet is for... and the web is too esoteric, difficult to set up and use, TCP/IP WinSock blahblah", and I dismiss the thing entirely on an ideological basis. That friend goes on to participate in something that later became .. Amazon.
Its 1994. I turn on the modem back at an ISP I've just built, in a place called Los Feliz. After a few months of putting out the fires, I decide "this ISP thing is balls", and I leave. The guy I built the first data center for, goes on to be worth 300 million buckaroonies.
Its 1996. An associate has flown us to San Francisco for the day, to meet a guy who has been trying to get his auction site launched for the past year. We have lunch, we discuss the whole concept of 'online auctions', I dismiss it as being unviable "because latency" and legal jurisdiction. Okay, a few years later, I buy a synthesizer on EBay. I still have it, to remind me of myopia.
Its 1997. I get hired to make a bookmark-management site, called "Storease". I build it, but I don't like it. People will find things, then add their URL to our site, and collect "Storease". "This will be too expensive to scale properly unless someone comes up with data-centers as a commodity..." Something about this rubs me up the wrong way. Could've been delicious, though.
Its 2010. I buy a few bitcoins, for 30 cents each, and keep them around long enough to make .. 300 bucks. I'm proud of myself for selling 10 bitcoins and making 300 bucks.
This stuff happens. Its a difficult thing for technologically inclined ideologues to see the woods for the trees.
Its 2023. I am still ignoring crypto. All my friends are millionaires. I'm just glad to have a new version of JUCE to play with ...
On the plus side I did end up working for some tech companies that did very well. No complaints.
It's really hard (read as impossible) to predict the future. Efficient markets and all that. If it was clear that Google would go where it went then it'd be priced even higher. Even if you knew that "selling things online is the future" in 1992 it's not always clear how to act on that knowledge. You could have gone bust with pets.com or something.
Fast forward to today. What is today's Google? What is today's "cloud"? What is today's bitcoin? Someone is saying something about something, someone is right, many are wrong.
I had several of these along the way (including having a proposal to create a company but I was too busy courting a girl - they sold it for around 100M€ and split in in three :))
I work in high tech (bleeding edge) and spend my time automating my home and writing open source (when not working). My wife, from time to time, mentions how much I could do and my son cannot understand why I do not want to go further up the company pyramid. But I am happy, I have all the money I need and can now sit in front of my screen answering to HN while keeping an eye on the dinner I am cooking.
So yeah, lots of lost opportunities but the partying was wild :)
And yeah, I am still ignoring bitcoins when the guys in my team are making money (but live on an emotional rollercoaster :))
It would be neat to catch up on what all of the people listed on https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/People.html have been doing for the last thirty years. I bet they are an interesting bunch!
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Incidentally, Vannevar Bush's Oral History 14-part document 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
