I imagine there are a fair number of our visitors who weren’t online to notice this — back in the day. Figured it might be useful to remind folks.
Many users know that Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the web at the Cern physics laboratory near Geneva.
One key date is 6 August 1991 – the day on which links to the fledgling computer code for the www were put on the alt.hypertext discussion group so others could download it and play with it.
On that day the web went world wide.
Gopher was released in Spring 1991 and for a few years statistics showed far more gopher traffic was passing across the net than web traffic.
During this time Mr Berners-Lee, Jeff Groff and colleagues involved in the world wide web project were evangelising their creation at conferences, meetings and online.
The whole project got a boost in April 1993 when the first PC web browser appeared. It was created by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois rather than at Cern because, said Jeff Groff, the web team did not have the staff available to write browsers for PCs, Macs or Unix machines.
Mosaic was so successful that it established many of the conventions of web use still around today, said Mr Groff. For instance, he said, the original conception of the web had no place for bookmarks or favourites.
Also in 1993, the University of MInnesota began charging for Gopher which led many people to consider alternatives far more seriously.
In late 1994 web traffic finally overtook gopher traffic and has never looked back. Now there are almost 100 million websites and many consider the web and the net indistinguishable.
But, said Mr Groff, only now is the web meeting the vision that the pioneers had for it.
The original conception was for a medium that people both read and contributed to. New tools such as photo-sharing sites, social networks, blogs, wikis and others are making good on that early promise, he said.
The web may be worldwide but it is only just getting started.
Nope. No mention of Al Gore in the article.
I think there’s still a copy of Mosaic installed on my #1 desktop….
Dunno if it works, though.
Regards,
Mosaic is still alive and I am using it right now to wright this. Only it has been terribly changed and renamed to Internet Explorer. 😉
Didn’t the internet run on tubes back then?
First time I ever saw the web was when Doug Kaye (one of the occasional TWiTs and my boss back then at RDS) was showing everyone in the office how the web worked. This was 1992 or 93. It seemed like a novelty and I wasn’t too interested. Not sure what it would be good for. So much for me being a visionary like Doug.
If anyone still runs Mosaic, can they let us know how it handles todays web sites?
Re: “If anyone still runs Mosaic, can they let us know how it handles todays web sites?”
Out of curiosity I just downoaded and installed Mosaic 3.0.
It runs OK on WinXP, but it is 10 years old and pretty much ignores CSS styles. So for example, it will show hidden text, it will ignore background colors, things like that.
For some reason it will show a line of m’s (like this: mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm) wherever there is a mailto: link .
Pages are readable, but really wierd looking.
Just opened my “Mosaic In A Box” 2.0 OEM. I feel like the post office delivering a letter 40 years too late. The CD is still shrink wrapped, the box never was. I wonder if it works. I wonder if it worth anything as is. How old is it? It says it is for Win95/Win 3.1 so that gives a hint. Going by Spencer’s comment, I’ll leave it as is.
Maybe I should get Al Gore to autograph it?
Al Gore never said he invented the word wide web, so why would the article mention him! 🙂
I still remember checking out the web for the first time using Lynx. Thank God someone created a real browser, because those early surfing attempts really sucked. All hail Marc Andreessen!
Wait a second…
There was life before the Internet???