Connecting... Waiting... It was slow, both because of dial-up kbit/s and ping to websites, and every page felt like you were literally sending a request to another part of the planet. It felt like that was actually happening, and it was very different from what we experience now.
But most importantly, there were zero funds/VC in that Internet. Only very niche websites, zero online services, even email was difficult to obtain and felt like a real privilege. Only the fact of being connected made everyone feel not a stranger.
I kind of miss that Internet, but I'm grateful that once I was part of it.
“I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water to me, though of course you need to pay the people who provide the information. Your comment already points out some of the bad side-effects of selling per access, or worse, tariffs per type of information or per item! Like: today's newspaper is 10CHF because there is this item in it which everyone wants to know about.”
Interesting too that an article on the front page the other day was about microtransactions for news.
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/388/21...
It was a fascinating way to experience the early WWW's exponential growth. It started out small, but once it began to grow, you could see it expanding faster and faster practically in real time.
At first it only took seconds to give the daily list a good once over. Over time it started taking minutes, then 20 minutes or half an hour (if things weren't too busy at work), and eventually it morphed into almost another full time job. There was just no way to keep up. Around that time they stopped sending it out.
From a historical point of view, these daily emails and monthly summaries would be a terrific resource for those interested in the early Web. It's hard to believe now that there was once a time when you could literally check out every new Web site as they came online.
Ted 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.)
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
My brain even ascribed a CRT distortion effect to it, even though that's not actually happening.
edit: okay, no, I am an idiot. Those pages were made in 2013:
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.
So far, I like this line-mode browser simulator much more than what is commonly available for the command line (lynx or links2). Does any one know of a modern implementation of it? (Where links are numbered instead of the user having to navigate around the document).
Navigation was moving a cursor around to highlight points of interest, some of which would be links to further stuff or controls to do something like go back or forwards.
Install lynx or links2 (ie text mode browsers) and you'll get the idea.
The vaguely graphic efforts with browsable content that you might recognise before www were the likes of Compuserve. That got you a sort of forum style interface.
It's quite hard to explain just how fast things have moved over the last 40 odd years (I'm 1970 to date - 55). I should also point out that my granddad saw rather a lot of change from 1901 to 1989. To be honest the last 15 odd years are even madder than the previous 25 and that's just my own personal recollection.
Would love to see the source for the original httpd.
Though you can browse and download the latest version 3.0A (1996), there is a directory where they have older versions, but its a bunch of files mixed up with different versions. https://www.w3.org/Daemon/old/
> 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
Performance: 100 Accessibility: 86 Best Practices: 92 SEO: 90
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.
I telnetted from my PC to a VAX, then to a X.25 PAD, then onto a Janet system, then to somewhere in the US and then to CERN. Eventually I'd get a menu with a link to the www. I'd then navigate the www with different keystrokes.
www was/is free form links to stuff instead of hierarchical menus. It was an evolution not a revolution and there is no need to invoke "chicken or egg".
CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)
Website about this project: https://first-website.web.cern.ch/
Some previous discussions:
6 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45125239
What is DU?