When i’m searching for articles on the net I never find any that predates 1995-96
You have got two problems here:
-
The web <> the internet. Usenet and other internet protocols like FTP servers have been around much longer.
-
I was on the web in 1994. There was a printed directory of web sites at the time and, although I was captivated, there was no good search engine and it was pathetic in content by today’s standards. Part of my joy in the web was watching it grow so fast starting with the period you mentioned and really marked its toddler years rather than just the birth.
If you want a real answer, Cern was where the first web page started. The site is still around today and has been in continuous operation since 1992 or so.
That’s pretty much around the time that the internet ‘exploded’ and began to be used and explored by ‘average’ people and not just computer geeks. I’m not sure about exactly when it all came to be, but I remember as late as 1993 my college roommate (a computer science major) was hooking up to “Bulletin Boards” via a 9600 bps modem. Those were not really the same as the web pages that we see on the WWW today.
The Internet was around well before then, though. I’m sure wikipedia has lots of info on it, but I believe it was used primarily by the government and academic institutions before it became easily available to the public.
There are still a few Gopher sites around. Here’s one gopher://gopher.well.com/
thanks for the info
I remember using the Gopher sites with a Unix command line internet account in the mid 90s.
What exactly constitutes a Gopher site? It looks like an FTP site with text files…basically a website without links all over the place. Weren’t Archie and Veronica two Unix programs used to access the Gopher sites?
Not quite.
Archie (from the word archive) was an FTP search engine. Veronica (origin obvious), which was a Gopher searcher came into being a couple of years later.
So, if we are to envision this in a graphical interface kind of manner, Veronica was burrowing around on all fours in the dirt beneath fine upstanding Archie’s powerful FTP engine?
Okay. I can envision this.
The first time I saw someone sign onto AOL with a disk was… around… 1993? 1994? All black and white. I was mesmerized, I had no IDEA what an Internet was.
Cartooniverse
Ahh, back in the days when you could Finger someone…
Those BBSs were not related to the Internet. The first one was in 1978, before ARPANet had become available to the public as the Internet. Such BBSs persisted for quite a while as dial-ups without any relationship to the Internet. For all I know there might be some real hard-core fans out there still using them.
That’s because AOL had nothing to do with the Internet. It started as a proprietary dial-up with its own content. It was a fancy BBS, which provided its own proprietary client instead of just using a text-based terminal emulator. It did provide access to Usenet newsgroups and ftp later, IIRC, but adding the Web was a fairly late development at AOL.
IMHO search engines were the second really significant contribution to the 'net. I remember trying to find stuff with Veronica. It was painful at best.
Gopher pages aren’t served by Web servers like Apache, but by … well, Gopher servers. The Gopher protocol is much different than the Web protocol.
Gopher pages also aren’t written in HTML; they’re plain text only, although you can serve images and binary files from a Gopher server. Gopher sites were very hierarchical. There’s no links in the actual content of a Gopher page. Browsing was easy: back and forth through the hierarchy, up and down through a list of categories or pages.
FWIW, I’ve been operating an urban planning-related Web site continuously since October 1994. Here’s the first message board post, from 1996. It’s not the original HTML page, though; I used WWWBoard in those days, and a couple of years ago converted the thousands of old messages I could find to vBulletin. Wasn’t easy. I think it’s the oldest post on a vBulletin site anywhere, but there could be some vBulletin sites with converted listserv archives that include even older messages.
It’s probably worth mentioning that BBSs could exchange mail with one another via modems and a network system called “Fidonet” which defined the topology and connectivity for message traffic. Some Fidonet systems were also gateways to the early Internet via Unix systems using UUCP, which meant that theoretically, you could have an Internet (RFC822) mail address that looked like bricker@f12.n109.z1.fidonet.org. That meant I was user “bricker” at Node 12, Net 109 (Washington Metro area), Zone 1 (North America).
My parents were early internet users and my mom was a member of SMUG and MacBBS. I used to download shareware games on that grayscale, text-based interface and transfer them via floppy disk to my ancient Mac Plus. This was around 1993 or 94, I think. Brings back a lot of childhood memories!
I bought my first PC in 1992 and got a Delphi internet account. It used ‘Pine’ for email which was a text based UNIX app. So few were the users that my email address was literally my first name 'at delphi.com
There was no real web browser as we know it. I think Lynx was how you looked at hyperlinked pages.
That was back when USENET was actually usefull and not full of spam.
Yes, and other nationwide dial-up content providers folks may remember include Compuserve, Prodigy (one of my friends still uses his old circa 1990 Prodigy email address as his primary address), QuantumLink, and GEnie.
Some of those little dial-up BBSes from the 80s (Commodore users were particularly fond of them), do still exist, although many now have a telnet presence on the web in addition to (or instead of) dial-up services.
Not everyone was on Fido; different BBS software systems had nets of their own. The most popular BBS software in my neck of the woods was WWIV (World War IV), which could share messages by WWIVnet (basically, the BBSes would call each other automatically in the wee hours, 4 AM or so, and trade message packets. And there were a few others, like VBBS, Renegade, and so on that had a similar thing of their own going.
The MIT guide to lock picking is dated 1991. I remember browsing that when there wasn’t a whole bunch of content on the web…probably '93 or there abouts. I was working abroad, and had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get an internet connection and the beta version of Mosaic downloaded via FTP and then get it working. (Winsock anyone?) The hoops were worth it, as I was going through “Dilbert” withdrawl…so be it known that Scott Adams was on the web at a very early date.