30 years ago: IPO day of Spyglass Inc., distributor of NCSA Mosaic

"In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

via https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114605076806447333

lawds yes

http://www.theoldrobots.com/index2.html

back when i first joined mastodon, one of the many surprising things i learned was that gopher had made a return to the public sphere after decades of obscurity.

i grew up with gopher and archie and veronica and many other www-alt protocols before getting hooked on the world wide web. they taught me how to hunt for things, in a time when web search didn't exist yet.

i've spent every day of the past week adding a new feature to kiki that i'm incredibly proud of, after hearing from several folks - namely @tomjennings and @scott, who (like me) are hungry for an information-dense and cruft-free internet

this works by turning your kiki pages into gopherspace pages through some formatting magic and textmunging. so now, you can host your kiki instance on both the www and in gopherspace, simultaneously.

it will be released in an upcoming version of kiki, available soon here: https://tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki

i can't stop laughing at the thought of someone seeing #kiki's NCSA Mosaic/Netscape 1.x theme in 2025 and wondering if the entire world wide web was entirely grey in 1994.
(it was)

if this doesn't do violence to the idea of software preservation, i don't know what could

for the past few years, i'm sure many of you have read my many lamentations about the death of the old, small web many of us grew up with.

there are tons of static site generators out there, but none of them did what i wanted: something that could build an entire site without futzing with javascript and library dependencies. i wanted something that we would have had in 2005, but didn't have in 2025.

in january, i decided to do something about it instead of whining. i started gluing together a few php scripts i had been using to build blogs, rss feeds and mini homepages. i even wrote a new mini markup language.

i thought it would take me a week. it took >3 months.

it ran for the past month as globaltalk.network's interactive site, and many of you asked if i'd ever let other people spin up an instance. i can finally say: yes!

today, kiki is officially finished and released for public use. named after my little black house demon, it's small, fast, and sometimes well behaved. and, it's all written in php without a single external dependency. just unzip and go.

it's released as shareware - in the oldest, finest, jankiest meaning of the word: you're free to goof around with and share the unregistered version. build your own little kiki instance, and customize the heck out of it until it feels like your own little home in the world wide web:

http://tomodashi.com/kiki

the best time to launch a 3d vrml chat world was 1995

the second best time is today

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

today’s absolutely mission critical acquisition: a cisco 2500 AS2511-RJ router/access server, which will be turned into a dial-up isp with a pile of 14.4k-33.6k external modems

circa 1995

back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

nothing felt more exotic than seeing ozemail.com.au domains join my irc channels in 1995

diskette image:
https://archive.org/details/15-ozemail-internet-starter-kit-v-2-orig

"Internet may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it." (December 5th, 2000)

got robots.txt ?

Dark Visitors - list of known AI (and other) agents on the internet : ‘the hidden ecosystem of autonomous chatbots and data scrapers’ https://darkvisitors.com/ #DarkVisitors #WebCrawlers #WorldWideWeb

in february 2000, Be announced it was releasing its BeOS operating system for free.

here is the website around the free launch. i sure do miss that swoopy web design aesthetic with handcrafted nav icons and lighting effects.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000815093906/http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/beosspecs.html

friendly request for fellow software preservationists:

i've been looking for a particular Win95-based program that was in use roughly from 1997-2000 called Peck's Power Post. it was a usenet binary posting program that was incredibly popular on binary groups in the late 90s, before it was replaced by Power Post 2000.

I know that the filename was PPP06B.ZIP and/or PPP06BF.ZIP

unfortunately, WBM didn't keep a proper archive of the file. the snapshot of http://www.visi.com/~loganx/PPP06b.zip appears to be corrupted, only downloading a 1MB file.

the file is approximately 4MB total.

discmaster and WBM have been searched exhaustively for this file with no luck. if you happen to know of another source for this very obscure program, i'd be indebted.

The world wide web looked radically different during its golden age, with companies like Spotify, Netflix, Amazon and Facebook drawing in massive numbers of users with “awesome features and affordable pricing,” Zak Storey writes for @TechRadar. Looking ahead, however, the future doesn't seem to be en route to becoming the result of changes for the better. Read more: https://flip.it/EqL1QO
#Tech #WorldWideWeb #Technology #AI #Internet #Computers

The #WorldWideWeb got started simply, as a bunch of altruistic academics wanting to spread information as widely and as freely as possible.

From that beginning, it steadily grew in popularity. Eventually, Money figured they could make a buck off of it. Some of our biggest corporations now wouldn't have been possible without the Web.

Now, those corporations are the source of many of the Web's biggest problems, and the best parts of it (like Wikipedia) are those that never lost sight of its foundation: distributing information wide and free.

The Web hasn't become ruined. People have just lost sight of its basis. You don't have to have a lot of money to play around on the internet, to make things for others there. it's how it started, and it's its salvation too.