What was the first publicly available web page and is it still available for viewing?
Yep.
Here’s the content of the first publicly available webpage. Unsurprisingly, its an explanation of what the world wide web is.
With a design like that, it is no wonder that they never went anywhere. Amateurish to the extreme.
Their list of people involved in created the world wide web is incomplete - they left off Al Gore!
Perhaps, but no Flash and no pop-ups, either.
Since the OP has been answered, I’ll ask the inevitable follow-up: What was the first pr0n to be posted on the Web?
Not pr0n, but here’s the first image to be posted. Apparently they’re a parody band made up of CERN employees.
I doubt you can pinpoint the first porn image posted to the web. Usenet existed long before the web and, although it was a little archaic to use, it had (and has) huge numbers of binaries news groups that store porn images in multi-part text messages that you could download and decode if you had the right tools. The first porn images posted to the web itself with have certainly been just decoded versions of ones already posted in Usenet.
I can testify personally that it was there very early. I got introduced to the web in 1994 through a beta version of Netscape and there was plenty of it then depending on your definition of “plenty”. There weren’t any good search engines and web sites were still listed in a printed directory that wasn’t all that large. It was pretty obvious even intuitively what the secondary purpose of this invention was. You could find porn just by jumping from link to link which was the only good way to navigate around unless you knew the specific site that you wanted.
Porn and the web go hand in hand in a fascinating way (no pun intended). There have been many articles written on the subject but the basic message is that the porn industry fueled the development of the web in a huge way. They were the first businesses to prove you could make money online and they helped develop many technologies from secure credit card web payments to web streaming that are used everywhere today.
It depends on what you mean by “on the web”.
The alt.sex newsgroup was created in 1988.
ASCII porn (making a pornographic image out of ASCII characters) has been around since the 1970s and was probably transmitted via e-mail at some point before the internet really was the internet.
Both of these pre-date the world wide web. FTP sites also had porn before the WWW and would have been accessible as soon as FTP transfers were able to be initiated from web pages (very early).
One of the biggest (technical) disappointments I have is based on this.
Back in the early 90’s, I maintained a web page for one of my college sports teams. I was endorsed by the Sports Information office at my university. I had the media guide online…player profiles…game schedules…and results.
I remember going to a book store and seeing something called - I think - “The Internet White Pages”…or it may have been “The Internet Yellow Pages”. It’s been a long time.
Anyway…it was a standard book. I checked under sports, and my web page was listed.
My mistake was not buying a copy of the book. I mean…how cool would it be to have a hard copy list of virtually ALL the web pages in existence…in the palm of your hand…and be listed in it?
…sigh…
-D/a
That’s been updated a bit, hasn’t it?