History of Computers & Internet

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[caltrek]

I first posted this in the Modern History thread, but should probably have posted it in this thread instead:


North America's First Website Turns Thirty Years Old
December 30, 2021

https://www.futurity.org/north-americas ... y-2675172/

Introduction:

(Futurity) As the World Wide Web was poised to begin its transformation of modern communications—and, well, life as we know it—a group of staff at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Lab at Stanford University saw an opportunity to vastly improve the exchange of information within large, international physics collaborations.

That inspiration led to the first website ever created in North America on a server at SLAC.

Physicist Tony Johnson was part of the group known as the WWW Wizards for their role in the project. Today, Johnson works on the control system for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera.

On the 30th anniversary of the first website, Johnson recalls the landscape of its birth and shares his thoughts on how the web continues to evolve the way scientists work: (see link to article above the quote box).

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

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[Yuli Ban]

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[Yuli Ban]

[citali_]

Some people knew about the internet as early as 1994. But it wasn't until 1996 that the internet became fully useful. It was everywhere, and those were the early days of internet services such as America Online, and Netscape.

I didn't use the internet until 1997, in computer class. We only had Windows 95, and America Online.

[Yuli Ban]

Some people knew about the internet as early as 1994. But it wasn't until 1996 that the internet became fully useful. It was everywhere, and those were the early days of internet services such as America Online, and Netscape.

I didn't use the internet until 1997, in computer class. We only had Windows 95, and America Online.

It goes much deeper than that, actually.
The World Wide Web was indeed pretty obscure up until the Eternal September, but for those truly in the know, you could use Usenet as far back as 1979. The oldest archived posts from Usenet date back to 1981, IIRC.
https://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2015/02/23 ... iving.html#

I also found a very old forum thread from 1996:
https://www.fodors.com/community/caribb ... ize-12642/
D'aaaw, I was a toddler when these posts were made.

Would be fun to do more digital archaeology.

[citali_]

Some people knew about the internet as early as 1994. But it wasn't until 1996 that the internet became fully useful. It was everywhere, and those were the early days of internet services such as America Online, and Netscape.

I didn't use the internet until 1997, in computer class. We only had Windows 95, and America Online.

It goes much deeper than that, actually.
The World Wide Web was indeed pretty obscure up until the Eternal September, but for those truly in the know, you could use Usenet as far back as 1979. The oldest archived posts from Usenet date back to 1981, IIRC.
https://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2015/02/23 ... iving.html#

I also found a very old forum thread from 1996:
https://www.fodors.com/community/caribb ... ize-12642/
D'aaaw, I was a toddler when these posts were made.

Would be fun to do more digital archaeology.

1996 was a big year for the internet. I remember the cheesy old TV commercials of America Online . They use to mail us the CDs to use on our PCs so that we could connect the internet.

[wjfox]

I first used the Internet in early '94. My Dad was an early tech adopter (he also got into VR, and personal computing before that).

I remember us going into a chatroom for Star Trek fans – all of whom were having in-character conversations, a sort of roleplay with Vulcans – and we accidentally made fun of them.

I can't emphasise this next point enough: it was a major novelty being able to exchange messages with random people from the other side of the planet in real time, from the comfort of your PC. These days, we take it completely for granted, but it was a huge leap in communication back then.

I used to browse for images of Mars and other planets. And even got into some early futurist stuff. The pictures took ages to load. But everything was so much simpler back then – websites had none of the fancy, dynamic content you see today. Little or no advertising. No video streaming. In some ways actually better, less intrusive I guess.

I built my own Geocities page on star types, around 1999. That's when I first learned HTML. Lots of crazy, random, personal websites could be found on Geocities and it functioned as a kind of precursor to all the social media, memes, and other stuff we have today. Search for Geocities on Google Images and you'll see what I mean.

The dot-com bubble felt like a mini-Singularity, with a gold rush of people snapping up the most generic and valuable domain names. Insane amounts of money were poured into failed ventures, causing perhaps the biggest ever crash in technology stocks.

Shortly after that came the whole file-sharing craze – Napster, Limewire, etc. In fact I still have a bunch of MP3s from 2000-2002. That whole period from about '94 to the early 2000s was a real Wild West age for the Internet. For me, the acquisition of YouTube by Google (in 2006, I think?) and the emergence of Web 2.0 marked the final end of that "old" Internet as it became more corporate, secure, controlled and standardised.

[Yuli Ban]

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[Time_Traveller]

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