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Comments (53)

• retired
  It’s impressive how quickly the WWW became mainstream, given how few people had internet access back then. Bitcoin is now 16 years old but compared to the WWW in 2008 is hardly used on a daily basis.
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  dirk94018
  I remember that. A few weeks later ran a script to count all the websites on the Internet.. 324 at that time.
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  avaer
  The line mode [1] made me pause. Not because you can do anything too useful (most of the cool links are dead, or telnet) but because it seems like a really cool place to explore, learn, and hack.No ads, no random tits, nobody trying to convert you to their politics, trying to scam you, or telling you to kill yourself. Just people sharing interesting things.Really makes me excited for the internet until I close the tab.[1] http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
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  Adachi91
  A little later, but I have a key chain from a dealership that has their website advertised on it, they didn't have a domain name so it's advertised as http://123.123.123.123/web.htm
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  usrbinbash
  The sad part is, how infinitely more functional these simple, static HTML documents are, compared to much of the shit that floods the "modern" web.Ofc these pages cannot replace SPAs. That's not the point. The point is: Much of the web isn't SPAs. And much of what is SPAs shouldn't be SPAs. Much of the web is displaying static, or semi-static information. Hell, much of the web is still text.But somehow, the world accepted that displaying 4KB of text somehow has to require transmitting 32MiB of data, much of it arbitrary code that has no earthly business eating my CPU cycles, as the new normal. Somehow everyone accepts that text-only informational pages need to abuse the scroll-event, or display giant hero-banners. Somehow, having a chatbot-popup on a restaurants menu-page is a must (because ofc I wanna talk to some fuckin LLM wrapper about the fries they sell!!!), but a goddamn page denoting the places address and telephone number is nowhere to be found.https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htmThis talk was given over a decade ago, and its takeaways are as relevant today as thy were back then, and in fact maybe even more so.
• TedDallas
  Ugh, memories. I'm so old my first web browser was Mosaic and I think I saw this. I used a provider called Texas MetroNet that served up dial-up PPP connections for $45 a month on a speedy 28.8K baud modem. Days of wonder, I tell ya.New days of wonder seem to be ahead, though. That said, there's about 100X more angst involved these days.
• busfahrer
  I've come across this before, one thing I haven't realized is that in addition to an emulator of the line browser, they're also offering an emulation of the original NeXT browser WorldWideWeb:https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser/
• rapnie
  On university campus when our student dorms got internet wired, we first got Gopher, and I remember - because it was hard to follow all these technology developments - that the web was like 'suddenly' there, and we started surfing. Everyone making the switch. Early pages were often copies of their Gopher equivalents.
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  Nition
  When this was first created, how did people usually navigate back to the previous page? I notice there are no "previous" or "home" links here. Was there a "back" button/key, or would you have to edit the URL directly?Edit: Answered my own question I think. If you choose the option to browse "using the line-mode browser simulator", you can literally type in "Back" to go back.
• bblb
  XanaduTed Nelson's dream since early `60s: all the world literature in one publicly accessible global online system (analogy: you can today get a telephone link from anywhere to anywhere, so why not from any text to any other?). Every reference to a text will lead to royalties being paid automatically to the author. Autodesk, (the makers of AutoCAD) will produce a product "real soon now". Includes the use of full versioning (claimed to be horrifyingly complex), "hot links" (called transclusions) and zippered texts (eg. parallel texts like for translations or annotations.)
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  WD-42
  Has anyone been able to recover the original source code? The README here: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/README.html mentions a src/ directory under the same location but it 404's to me.Would love to see the source for the original httpd.
• ghssds
  I really like how different and the same the html tags are.
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  lukeiodev
  Sometimes I really miss the pure, text-first web. No popups, no cookie banners, just raw information.
• piokoch
  Ah, fond memories... First website in Poland was the homepage of the Faculty of Physics of the Warsaw University (been there at that time). It was 1993 I think, although wayback machine stores a newer snapshot (1998), but it looks the same as original page: https://web.archive.org/web/19980120060239/https://www.fuw.e...
• mjcohen
  In the mid 70's, I was a graduate CS student at USC's Information Sciences Institute. I remember my feeling of awe when I used Arpanet (or was it Darpanet) to log into London and do stuff there. Wow!
• tempestn
  This is great. I particularly enjoyed this entry in the FAQ about how to find web pages: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/KeepingTrack.html> When (s)he has found an overview page which (s)he feels ought to refer to the new data, (s)he can ask the author of that document (who ought to have signed it with a link to his or her mail address) to put in a link.> By the way, it would be easy in principle for a third party to run over these trees and make indexes of what they find. Its just that noone has done it as far as I know
• vaylian
  I appreciate the HTTPS support
• gingersnap
  Still faster than most websites
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  vivzkestrel
  how did we go from this to nextjs?
• t1234s
  Not bad PageSpeed scores for the first site:Performance: 100 Accessibility: 86 Best Practices: 92 SEO: 90
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  whatsupdog
  Banned in UAE (at least on DU)
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  fsckboy
  declaring a website to be "first" introduces a definitional problem.to put it in terms of a simple example, you need several HTML pages before one of them can link to another, but so far that's just hypertext. then you need pages spread out across plural sites to be able to create a web.
• ChrisArchitect
  Related:CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095429
• ChrisArchitect
  A (1992) copy.Website about this project: https://first-website.web.cern.ch/Some previous discussions:6 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451252392024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177906
• wangzhongwang
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• anon
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• anon
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• bruceyao1984
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• winston_smith_
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