Happy 15th birthday, WWW!

[dory36]

Doesn't seem that long ago...

On February 26 1991, a fellow by the name of Tim Berners-Lee first presented in public something he called "WorldWideWeb" (without spaces) which he had assembled using a new computer manufactured by the company where I worked at the time.

It was the first and only "web browser" in the world at that time. There was just one website in the world, in Tim Berners-Lee's lab. The best estimate available is that there are 76,184,000 websites today.

More at http://www.w3.org/History.html

[Nords]

"Weaving the Web"-- his most excellent book on the subject.

I like the part where HTML was just one of many competing Internet tools, most of which were open-source. A company with a similar hypertext concept had attempted to charge for their software and had been promptly abandoned in favor of other freely-available tools.

Berners-Lee gave it away because he didn't think anyone would use it otherwise. But now he's finally starting to gain the merited appreciation.

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Oh come on now, Al Gore invented it in the 70's. He's just so embarrassed about the hubub of his inventing the internet that he hasnt come forward yet about this additional achievement

I remember the early internet. Thousands of .edu sites and pretty much the rest was porn.

[Nords]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Completely Fulla BS I remember the early internet.* Thousands of .edu sites and pretty much the rest was porn.

Ah, yes, and it's so much different today?!?

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Hmmm...not much...except hits on Vida Guerra porn sites appear to be up 37% from yesterday...

[cube_rat]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Completely Fulla BS Hmmm...not much...except hits on Vida Guerra porn sites appear to be up 37% from yesterday...

Vida does porn? I thought she was a scantiy clad model with a booty that won't quit.

[cute fuzzy bunny]

She does if you pay $14.99 a month to my web site.

[sgeeeee]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cute n' Fuzzy Bunny Hmmm...not much...except hits on Vida Guerra porn sites appear to be up 37% from yesterday...

How about some urls?

[wabmester]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dory36 On February 26 1991, a fellow by the name of Tim Berners-Lee first presented in public something he called "WorldWideWeb" (without spaces) which he had assembled using a new computer manufactured by the company where I worked at the time.

It looks like he had a browser working in 1990. So, who decided that the birthday should fall on the date of that particular February presentation?

And the NeXT cube was a cool machine, but when I lived in the Bay Area, I picked up an Imlac from a guy who worked at SAIL. The same type of machine that Englebart demonstrated hypertext on in the 1960's. I suppose it could have been the same machine, since both were at Stanford.

Ah, those were the days of bit diddling, blinkenlights, and walking through waist-high snow to school....

[cute fuzzy bunny]

The 60's or the 90's?

I sort of miss computing from the 1970's. Going to a computer show was always interesting. Everyone was doing everything differently. A lot of innovation. Unfortunately I was a teenager and everything cost $6000.

[cube_rat]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cute n' Fuzzy Bunny The 60's or the 90's? I sort of miss computing from the 1970's.* Going to a computer show was always interesting.* Everyone was doing everything differently.* A lot of innovation.* Unfortunately I was a teenager and everything cost $6000.

I remember the old IBM PC's (circa 1980). You had to boot the O/S with a floppy :P Wordstar and Visi(super)Calc (replaced with Lotus 1-2-3)were all the rage in the office.

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Oh yeah? When I was a compukid we had to write our own BIOS and BDOS, burn a home made bootstrap into a ROM chip and try to boot some crappy OS off a cassette deck with a tarbell cassette interface.

And we were damn glad to not have to feed paper tape of the operating system and then our programs on cards anymore.

But greasing the wheels on the old ASR/33 teletypes got onerous.

[cube_rat]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cute n' Fuzzy Bunny Oh yeah? When I was a compukid we had to write our own BIOS and BDOS, burn a home made bootstrap into a ROM chip and try to boot some crappy OS off a cassette deck with a tarbell cassette interface. And we were damn glad to not have to feed paper tape of the operating system and then our programs on cards anymore. But greasing the wheels on the old ASR/33 teletypes got onerous.

Dude, you were even an uber-geek as a kid.

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Heck yeah! The computer store I worked in as a kid (started cashiering and getting the donuts while I learned) was frequented by the eventual founders of Technical Design Labs, Xitan, Phoenix Technologies, Miniterm and a couple of the eventual higher ups at Sun. Bill Gates dropped by to show off his Basic interpreter a few times but it was incredibly buggy and slow so we stuck with selling the TDL Basic - which also used half the memory of Gates' interpreter. Guess that should have been a harbinger of the future...

The owner had a phd in computer science; his brother was his princeton class valedictorian in finance and business.

Pretty good "crowd" to steep in as a teenager if you want to end up going into the computer business...

[wabmester]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cute n Fuzzy Bun'ny The 60's or the 90's?

I picked up the Imlac in the 90's, but it was used in the late 60's / early 70's as the front end for a PDP-10 to run Englebart's NLS with hyperlinking, the first mouse, and other cool stuff.

http://bootstrap.org/chronicle/chronicle.html#2T