I remember that. A few weeks later ran a script to count all the websites on the Internet.. 324 at that time.
The line mode [1] made me pause. Not because you can do anything too useful (most of the cool links are dead, or telnet) but because it seems like a really cool place to explore, learn, and hack.
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
When this was first created, how did people usually navigate back to the previous page? I notice there are no "previous" or "home" links here. Was there a "back" button/key, or would you have to edit the URL directly?
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.
Has anyone been able to recover the original source code? The README here: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/README.html mentions a src/ directory under the same location but it 404's to me.
Would love to see the source for the original httpd.
A little later, but I have a key chain from a dealership that has their website advertised on it, they didn't have a domain name so it's advertised as http://123.123.123.123/web.htm
In the mid 70's, I was a graduate CS student at USC's Information Sciences Institute. I remember my feeling of awe when I used Arpanet (or was it Darpanet) to log into London and do stuff there. Wow!
This is great. I particularly enjoyed this entry in the FAQ about how to find web pages: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/KeepingTrack.html
> 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
Not bad PageSpeed scores for the first site:
Performance: 100 Accessibility: 86 Best Practices: 92 SEO: 90
how did we go from this to nextjs?
declaring a website to be "first" introduces a definitional problem.
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.
Related:
CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)
A (1992) copy.
Website about this project: https://first-website.web.cern.ch/
Some previous discussions:
6 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45125239
Banned in UAE (at least on DU)
Xanadu
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.)