I saw a video of Tim Berners-Lee demonstrating an archived version of his first website experiments. He developed it on a NextCube. It wasn’t really that interesting, it was more like the personal info web pages you saw in the early days of the web. You know, a sparse all-text page with a contact address, a few subpages of technical info on some computer stuff.
If you want to see the first web-like interface, Stanford recently published video clips on the web of a lecture by Englebart, the mouse inventor. He demonstrated the first implementation of a point and click interface with hyperlinks. Must date back to the early 1960s sometime.
Shiva, I think it was below the belt. First you obliquely aknowledged that you did not know something, then, instead of “retro-geek”, you yourself came back and made fool of yourself:
<< “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”? >> whoever said it implied that the danger is in the unwillingness to learn. I very vaguely remembered the story which Minkman knows by heart. I earn my living elsewhere and know about the Internet more than I know about my car, my TV and hundreds of other things I use.
Who is Javaman? Extremely witty and smart person. Such a joke! Full of subtle humor. Pentagon-type. They call it barracks humor. Cool, man!
Incidentally, the Pentagon runs the defense of the people og this country, including you. Who are you, dog or cat?
I disagree that ‘www’ has anything to do with defining the web. I’m quite happy to go to http://boards.straightdope.com - I don’t know if TBL invented http://www.foo.bar, but it is apparent that the first server was not named www but ‘info’.
Well my site has only been around since 1995. Find the Spam was around way before that though. It isn’t the oldest, but it’s old. I’d like to nominate it as a sort of honorary oldest, because I love it so much
I am of the opinion that the first “website” should be considered to be the first file that used HTML and the hypertext transfer protocol to be sent over the internet. Using the criteria that the address has to contain the www. prefix doesn’t work for me. If I go to view a page at support.microsoft.com or home.netscape.com I’m still viewing pages on the web via the internet, right?
Shiva, you self criticism was too subtle for stoned me: there was the salutation (“Peace,…”), and then three lines. But whatever…No hard feelings…Still friends… At least http://www.friends…www=World Wide Web
Yes, the presence of “www” in front of the name has no relationship to what kind of protocol is being used. It is common to use “mail” for mail servers, “www” for web servers, “ftp” for ftp servers (for example, http://www.virginia.edu, mail.virginia.edu, ftp.virginia.edu for the University of Virginia), but they can be named anything.
Arjuna34
It is just a convention that many (most?) webservers are named ‘www’. ‘info’ is as valid a name as anything else for a webserver. For that matter, you can name a webserver ‘mail’, ‘ftp’, or ‘gopher’, but that gets kind of confusing. A webserver is simply any machine with an active HTTP listening process on it (and persumably HTML documents to serve up once the requests come in, but that isn’t strictly necessary).
Because that’s what a webserver is, by definition. ‘web server’ and ‘http server’ are synonymous terms.
Well, I’m satisfied that an http server, and ergo, an http prefix are the defining factors of a website, thanks.
As a side note, I find it suprising that DNS resolution, and obvioulsy DNS servers predate the web. I presume these somehow functioned with ftp servers, mail servers and telnet. I guess that makes sense, but I always rationalized that DNS was dependant on the TLDs which I feel confident in saying don’t predate the web. Anyone care to explain how domain name databases were organized pre-Network Solutions. Is there a such thing as pre-Network Solutions?
Kinda rare to see people differentiating between the internet and the web anymore.
Nope, the DNS system has been around since the early 80s. I believe the idea was first formally proposed in RFC 819 in 1982, and I think it was pretty much fully implemented by '85 or so.
Before that the internet was small enough that every system just had a hosts file with all internet hostnames and IP addresses. It was still centrally administered; you would just periodically grab the newest hosts file via ftp.
This site, for instance, says the following happened in 1985:
As for what was done before Network Solutions (in its role as part of Internic), this also appears under 1985:
DCA is the Defense Computing Agency, which was originally responsible for managing The Internet. SRI stands for Systems Research Institute; I’m not exactly sure what they did (other than handle nick registrations). Internic wasn’t created until 1993, by which time there was quite a few websites out there, I believe, since CERN’s site (info.cern.ch) went up in 1991.
Well, you’d think living about 3 blocks from NCSA for 4 and half years I’d know all these things. Thanks for doing all the leg work there guys, interesting stuff. I wasn’t aware that this many aspects of the internet were developed in such a non-linear fashion.
One of these days I’ll know better than to assume, eh?
