On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss at CERN. “Vague but exciting” was his feedback. The project later became the World Wide Web.

Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, for changing the world!

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

From the year 2001:

I remember when web-sites like this were considered very, very, sleek, new, and fancy.

And, compared to what web-sites tended to look like in the 1990s, they were!

@cybercultural @ricmac

RE: https://indieweb.social/@cybercultural/113989953061003587

"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.

i've noticed in recent years that the laudable return to personal homepages has generally brought with it a very specific re-imagining of 1990s web design - usually lo-fi 1994 html-only and neon cyberpunkish affairs with loud animated gifs.

lost in that specific imaginary are 1996-1997 corporate designs that brought a slightly more conservative aesthetic that nonetheless remained playful.

if you played Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb, Dinotopia, or Faery Tale Adventure 2 you would remember The Dreamers Guild. this is their corporate site still live and maintained by joe pearce and brad schenck.

https://inherittheearth.net/dgi/indexnf.htm

Okay... it seems Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has just joined the Fediverse at:

@timbl

(For those wondering about verification, this is genuine as far as I can tell. The account is on the w3c server and they only allow manually verified signups, plus the verified account of the w3c is following him.)

Thank you to @vmstan for the headsup about this!

thanks to @MossRC’s exceptional book Shareware Heroes, TIL that TUCOWS stood for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software.

#WorldWideWeb / #WWW picks of the day:

@w3c - Official org maintaining web standards

@wai - W3C initiative to make web more accessible

@owa - Non-profit org protecting open web

@openwebdocs - Documenting open web tech

@smashingmag - Magazine for web devs

@php - Official PHP account

@django - High-level Python web framework

@mediawiki - Wikipedia's software for making wikis

@FirefoxDevTools - Web dev tools built into Firefox

@ddev - Web dev tool for PHP & Node.js

Am I alone in my seething dislike of autoplay videos? I thought it was cool when I first heard about <canvas> but in some ways, HTML4 was peak web.

buried in my 30 year old copy of NSCA Mosaic alpha was a bookmarked hyperlink to a university of cambridge (uk) live webcam of a coffee pot, brewing in the Trojan Room computing lab

while live coffee/lab cams were not uncommon in the mid 90s, this one is fascinating for a few reasons:

- it was up and running in 1991, predating the graphical world wide web by a few years
- it ran over the MSNL protocol using a telecom network standard called ATM, which was a competitor to ethernet
- an entire machine was dedicated to grabbing a frame from the camera, compressing it, and uploading to the web server: an Acorn Archimedes
- the exact URL stored in Mosaic still resolves today, and the web page hasn't changed in 30 years

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

more history of the setup here:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/coffee.html

more images of the sacred pot by @quentinsf here:
https://statusq.org/archives/2024/07/11/12127/

"On August 6, 1991 [33 years ago], the first website was introduced to the world. [It] contained information about the World Wide Web Project. It launched at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, where it was created by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee."

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Happy birthday, web!

Via https://www.npr.org/2021/08/06/1025554426/a-look-back-at-the-very-first-website-ever-launched-30-years-later

just 200 posts of people taking photos of ice cream trucks in their neighbourhoods in canada

this is what forums are for

https://cptdb.ca/topic/9366-ice-cream-and-milk-trucks/