15 Years (give or take) of the WWW

September 15th, 2006 | Category: Heidi's Entries,Recommendations
written by: Heidi Cool

Heritage
Where I spent my summer vacation.

Yesterday was my first day back at work after an Internet-free vacation in Maine on the schooner, Heritage (pictured right). Today I received an e-mail announcing that this year marks the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web. The message included a link to a timeline of Web history beginning with ideas that first surfaced in 1945. This timeline was part of TechWeb's article series, The Online Supernova: 15 Years Of The World Wide Web. Whether you are new to Web development or have been tinkering with it since the early 1990's, I think you will find it interesting to read the article and review how the Web developed and where it may be going in the future.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium's history page, Tim Berners-Lee actually began developing the Web in 1989. By 1990 he had created the first Web browser and first Web pages, then in 1991 he uploaded the pages to the Internet.

Back then, most of us who were online were still pretty excited about things like Gopher and Usenet. I recall plugging my new 14400 modem into my Macintosh Centris 650 back in 1993. After a good few hours of adjusting settings I was finally able to connect to the Cleveland Freenet from home. From there I could wander through lists of items in gopher space that would let me link to other lists of items and finally to plain text documents! Soon after that I was telnetting to other systems, reading newsgroups, and starting to get a sense of the connections that were building in the online community.

Then I heard about the Web. It was like Gopher on steroids. Using the text browser, Lynx, I could visit a Web site, read about someone's favorite Star Trek episodes and learn all about their pets—back then that was fairly typical content. After signing up for a shell account with a local ISP, I learned about Mosaic, a browser that would not only let you read text, but would also let you look at pictures of people's pets. Not wanting to spend an extra $10 per month to look at photos of fluffy kittens named Uhura, I stuck with Lynx for the first year.

In the meantime I started tinkering with HTML. I really didn't know what sort of content I wanted to publish, but I wanted to know how it worked. Relying on the no longer updated "Beginner's Guide to HTML," I started building pages that were mostly full of links to other pages. I also received advice from my more tech-savvy friends—with whom I would ponder content development.

We knew we had access to a very cool new toy, but we just weren't sure what we should do with it. I recall our initial ideas included creating a service that would allow real estate agents to post house listings online. Now of course agencies each have their own sites, but back then we really didn't know how commercial sites were going to develop.

Now in 2006, I have no shortage of ideas for content, only a shortage of time. What began as simple experimentation eventually became my full time job. 15 years ago I couldn't have predicted that. What do you think of the evolution of the World Wide Web? Did it turn out as you expected? Can you predict where it will lead next?

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8 Comments »
  1. Yes, I too was on the Cleveland Freenet but in 1992. I thought it was great! I was a student at Akron U. and found out that I could order articles and books from Ohiolink through this new thing called the Internet. I would wonder and dream about how would it be possible to make money with this new medium. Then when someone showed me the WWW, I didn't really know what I was looking at. I thought it was a video game.I knew I wanted to be in "MIS", Management Information Systems, as it was called back then. It wasn't until my first fulltime tech job in 1997 that we started using the phrase "Information Technology". Anyway, after teaching myself basic HTML about 10 years ago, today I do make money by building websites except I didn't bank on having to learn a new language every two to three years. So far, I have gone from HTML to Javascript, to ASP, and now ASP.NET. Not to mention playing around with Perl, XML, and a whole bunch of other alphabet soup. Happy Birthday Web!

    Comment by Henry — September 15, 2006 @4:42 pm

  2. Criminy! Talk about memories - I recall getting onto a BBS via my dinky monochrome-monitored (green - remember those?) computer back in the day. And using Word Perfect or some such to code the HTML for my first website sometime later. Remember all the garish pages, now reproduced by MySpace?

    Comment by Marketing Products — May 1, 2007 @9:19 pm

  3. Ah yes, I remember the day on such a machine that I thought it might be quicker to telnet to my account and use Vi to make a quick edit to a page rather than FTP'ing over a new file. Aigh. Other than that I usually preferred using simple text on my old Mac to edit HTML.

    Comment by Heidi Cool — May 8, 2007 @6:08 pm

  4. About 1975 I remember feeding a stack of punched cards into some giant machine in a class called "Fortran4". Now I'm 54 years old and chucking my great San Diego lifestyle and moving to Boquete, Panama. But I will be taking my trusty laptop along. Anyone care to join me??

    Comment by Dan — May 15, 2007 @11:55 pm

  5. Wow, you have really lasted teh test of internet time and even survived the dot com bust. Great to see so much experience.

    Comment by web design — June 27, 2007 @4:47 pm

  6. It took 38 years for radio to get a market of at least 50 million users; it took television 13 years to achieve 50 million users; and once it was open to the general public, it is estimated that it took just four years for the internet to achieve 50 million users

    Comment by work at home — July 17, 2007 @4:21 am

  7. Internet brought us a lot of good things! I had to learn basic html using notepad and keep a copy of all the html tags because i dont remember all of it. Now you can create web pages with one click or ready made templates.

    Comment by Sano — October 8, 2007 @4:19 am

  8. Twitter Comment... @hacool "Not wanting to spend an extra $10 per month to look at photos of fluffy kittens named Uhura..." lmao! [link to post] #trek - Posted using Chat Catcher ...

    Trackback by glennhudson (Glenn D. Hudson) — April 10, 2009 @3:34 am

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