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Browse By Year: 1989-19941995-19961997-20002001-20062006-2020All
March 12, 1989 Mar 12 1989
Information Management, a Proposal
While working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee first comes up with the idea
for the World Wide Web. To pitch it, he submits a proposal for
organizing scientific documents to his employers titled "Information
Management, a Proposal." In this proposal, Berners-Lee sketches out
what the web will become, including early versions of the HTTP
protocol and HTML.
October 17, 1990 Oct 17 1990
IMDb
Col Needham publishes a few Unix scripts to a Usenet group for
browsing and searching through a user generated index of movie lists
subdivided into several categories. He calls it the rec.arts.movies
movies database. Years later, Needham and a few others would move the
interface online and incorporate officially as IMDb.
December 25, 1990 Dec 25 1990
WorldWideWeb Browser
Tim Berners-Lee releases WorldWideWeb (later Nexus) on Christmas day,
the first ever browser for the web. It is far from primitive,
featuring a built-in HTML editor alongside graphical features.
However, it is only available on NeXT machines and fails to gain much
traction.
The Web's First (And Second) Browser
Published: September 25, 2017
The web's first browser featured full color, read/write capabilities,
and multiple windows. The second browser was a text-only command line
tool. Guess which one people actually used?
April 1, 1991 Apr 01 1991
Gopher
Engineers at the University of Minnesota develop Gopher, a new
internet protocol and early competitor to the web. Gopher
organizes documents using a tight hierarchy that can be accessed
through Gopher clients, similar to web browsers.
What the Web Could Have Been
Published: April 18, 2017
Before the web, Gopher offered a way to connect to the Internet and
share documents. And if things had gone a little differently, it
might even be what we use to surf information today.
May 14, 1991 May 14 1991
Line Mode Browser
Nicola Pellow finishes work on the Line Mode Browser, a text only
CLI-based browser for accessing the web. Because of its simplicity,
the browser could be easily ported to a variety of operating systems
making it incredibly popular despite a limited feature set.
June 6, 1991 Jun 06 1991
"Surf the Net"
Brendan Kehoe, while inquiring about a troublesome user on a Usenet
newsgroup, coins the phrase "net-surfing." Over time, surfing the net
, will become a more or less common idiom.
August 1, 1991 Aug 01 1991
WWW Virtual Library
In order to keep tabs on new websites, Tim Berners-Lee creates a
hypertext list on the CERN site he calls the WWW Virtual Library. To
get on the list, site owners could personally email Berners-Lee their
link, and he would add it. The Library would later move to its own
site.
August 6, 1991 Aug 06 1991
Tim Berners-Lee Announces the WWW
Berners-Lee, responding to a thread on the alt.hypertext Usenet
newsgroup, publicly announces the World Wide Web project for the
first time. In the coming months, Berners-Lee would use other
newsgroups to help spread word about the web.
The Importance of Being on Usenet
Published: July 17, 2017
Ever wondered how people found about the web. The first transmission
of its existence was a digital one, a Usenet post that sparked a
following of early web pioneers.
August 6, 1991 Aug 06 1991
The First Website
Tim Berners-Lee publishes the first website as a way of both
demonstrating what the web was, and explaining it's purpose. It ran
off of Berners-Lee's NeXT computer and included a list of links to
other relevant CERN documents. It would be the point of discovery for
many early web adopters.
October 29, 1991 Oct 29 1991
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
Tim Berners-Lee publicly links to a draft of HTML on the www-talk
mailing list. HTML is a hypertext markup language used by developers
to create websites, and is the foundation of the WWW. The language
itself was influenced by similar efforts like SGML, but has since
evolved into a lot more.
A Brief History of Hypertext
Published: February 20, 2017
Without hypertext, there would be no World Wide Web. But its name and
conception predate the web's creation by decades.
November 28, 1991 Nov 28 1991
The HTTP Protocol
As part of his specification for the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee
introduces HTTP as a way for clients (web browsers) to communicate
with servers. The first draft, HTTP v0.9, includes only one method, a
GET request, used by clients as a read-only way to retrieve web
pages.
December 12, 1991 Dec 12 1991
SLAC Website
A team at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory launches the
first web server and website in the United States at
slac.stanford.edu. The website is notable for its connection to the
SPIRES-HEP database, a digital repository of tens of thousands of
particle physics papers that gave instant utility to a still
incipient web.
The First Website in the United States Was Made for Physicists
Published: January 21, 2020
Tim Berners-Lee has said, on multiple occasions, the the first
website in the US was one of the major reasons the web took off. But
what did it do and why was it so important?
February 5, 1992 Feb 05 1992
WWW Wizards
After helping to launch the website of SLAC, Louise Addis forms the
WWW Wizards group. The group would go through a few name changes over
the next few years, but they were crucial in helping users understand
how the web worked, both at Stanford and around the world through
active development contributions and support of web creators.
March 9, 1992 Mar 09 1992
ViolaWWW
Notable as the first browser developed outside of CERN, ViolaWWW was
a browser developed by Pei-Yuan Wei while working at UCLA Berkley.
The browser was an experiment, meant to demonstrate the power of
Wei's scripting language, Viola, the browser was among the first to
render tables, scriptable objects, and stylesheets and would serve as
a template for many of the browsers released in subsequent years.
March 18, 1992 Mar 18 1992
The URL
Tim Berners-Lee presents the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), later
renamed to the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), to the IETF. The URL
is one of the founding technologies of the web, and is a standards
that dictates how web page addresses are constructed, allowing
browsers to easily connect to documents across the decentralized
network.
What Happens When You Enter a URL In Your Browser of Choice
Published: April 15, 2019
There's this scene in the second season of The Crown (if you watch
enough old movies, you'll see the same kind [...]
April 12, 1992 Apr 12 1992
BBEdit
BBEdit releases the first version of their text editor with the
unique slogan "It doesn't suck." A few years later, BBEdit 4.0 would
make HTML editing a core feature, with support for syntax
highlighting and uploading directly to a web server.
July 22, 1992 Jul 22 1992
Lynx
Lynx was a text only browser created by programmers at the University
of Kansas. Though it ran entirely inside of a terminal, and therefore
had a higher than average barrier to entry, it nevertheless provided
users with basic formatting and keyboard shortcuts for navigating the
web. One of its creators, Lou Montulli, would later become one of the
founding members of the Netscape team.
November 1, 1992 Nov 01 1992
Veronica Search Engine
Veronica is created as a new Gopher server type specifically built
for indexing and searching other Gopher servers. Veronica was able to
index results from thousands of servers at time, and translate a text
based search into a list of available documents.
November 1, 1992 Nov 01 1992
libwww
Originally known as the Common Library, libwww offers a programatic
foundation for creating browsers. Tim Berners-Lee salvages a lot of
code from his WorldWideWeb browser in order to create the package,
and releases it open source to a growing web community. It would aid
in the creation of over half a dozen browsers in under a year.
November 3, 1992 Nov 03 1992
Samba
Originally known as simply MacWWW, Robert Calliau and Nicola Pellow
develop the first browser for the Mac at CERN in 1992. Version 1.0
would officially be released a year later, though popularity would
quickly wane once Mosaic released a Mac version of their browser.
November 16, 1992 Nov 16 1992
MidasWWW
Tony Johnson, a researcher at SLAC, develops MidasWWW. It runs on
Unix machines and is not dissimilar from other graphical browsers at
the time with one notable difference. It could display PDF documents
in browser, a key feature for scientists and academics hoping to
browse the web for research papers.
April 21, 1993 Apr 21 1993
NCSA Mosaic
NCSA releases Mosaic version 1.0, developed by Marc Andreessen and
Eric Bina. It features inline multimedia, an easy to use GUI, and
visual elements for web designers to make use of. Soon after launch,
Mosaic would become the most popular browser on the market.
The Origin of the IMG Tag
Published: March 7, 2017
Why is it the ![]()
tag instead of the tag? The answer, it
turns out, dates back to one of the web's earliest browsers and one
of the web's earliest discussions.
April 30, 1993 Apr 30 1993
CERN puts the Web in the public domain
At the urging of Berners-Lee and his team, and thanks in part to the
downturn of Gopher after they began charging for their protocol and
software, CERN officially enters the World Wide Web into the public
domain, making it freely available to anyone. It is perhaps the
single most impactful decision made on behalf of the web, and enabled
an entire generation of programmers to extend it, build with it, and
spread it.
June 14, 1993 Jun 14 1993
NCSA What's New
NCSA, the company behind Mosaic, creates What's New, a webpage that
highlights the most popular new sites updated every weekday. The page
is added to the Mosaic browser homepage and receives quite a bit of
traffic.
June 30, 1993 Jun 30 1993
World Web Wanderer first deployed
Using web crawling technology he invented, Matthew Gray develops the
World Wide Web Wanderer. The WWWW collects data about websites and
stores it in a single database called the Wandex, offering some
search-like functionality and a snapshot of the web's global usage
and spread.
How We Searched Before Search
Published: March 20, 2017
Believe it or not, there was a time before search engines. Discovery
on the web was far more difficult. It was easy to get lost. That is,
until a few different people created a map.
July 28, 1993 Jul 28 1993
World Wide Web Wizards Workshop
A three day conference aimed at bringing together the greatest minds
on the web and organized by Dale Dougherty at the O'Reilly offices in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the first time that Tim Berners-Lee
shared his idea for a web consortium, and included discussions about
the future of web technologies and the ideological aim of the web
project.
Making the Web For Everyone
Published: July 23, 2019
I talked a bit about the importance of the WWW Wizards Workshop last
time in my recap on the importance [...]
August 19, 1993 Aug 19 1993
Global Network Navigator
Often referred to as the web's first commercial publication, GNN is
an interactive guide to the web that contains news stories and links
to popular sites. It is updated regularly and would later become the
first site to experiment with advertising.
September 1, 1993 Sep 01 1993
World Wide Web Worm
Oliver McBryan develops the World Wide Web Worm (WWWW), one of the
web's first search engines. Most search engines of the time were
manually curated, but the WWWW automatically crawled sites and kept
them in a database, then matched them to user queries. It would not
be released until March of the next years.
September 2, 1993 Sep 02 1993
W3Catalog
Oscar Nierstrasz publishes W3Catalog. The website is able to
automatically compile several curated lists, like What's New and the
WWW Virtual Library, into one place using a web scraper built
by Nierstrasz.
October 1, 1993 Oct 01 1993
Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA)
Started by a few students at UC Santa Cruz, the IUMA is at first a
simple FTP drive of MP3 files from lesser-known bands that anyone can
download and listen to for free. When the idea goes viral, the group
begins soliciting submissions from bands around the world and builds
a website to organize tracks and quick download links.
November 1, 1993 Nov 01 1993
Ranjit's HTTP Playground
Ranjit Bhatnagar launches one of the first examples of a personal
website. His so-called "HTTP Playground" starts with a bulleted list
of what he had for lunch every day. Over time, his content expands
from the banal to the intimate, sharing stories and opinions from his
life with an offbeat humor.
November 8, 1993 Nov 08 1993
HTML+
Dave Raggett publishes HTML+, a specification that extends HTML which
had, at the time, grown stagnant. Included in HTML+ are many features
that had already been implemented by browsers, such as tables and
advanced forms. HTML+ would go on as an inspiration for HTML 3.2.
November 14, 1993 Nov 14 1993
Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
The Common Gateway Interface is formalized as a standard by the NCSA
Mosaic team. It allowed web servers to connect to more advanced
scripts to generate dynamic HTML content. This allowed developers to
execute programs from the server to do things like track visitors,
process forms, or update content on a page.
January 1, 1994 Jan 01 1994
Yahoo!
Jerry Yang and David Filo create their online directory, Jerry and
David's guide to the World Wide Web, in just a few weeks while
working on their electrical engineering degrees at Stanford. The site
immediately garnered attention as the place for discovering new
sites, organized into neat and tidy, but somewhat strange,
categories. A few months later, the site would be renamed to simply
Yahoo!.
January 26, 1994 Jan 26 1994
Python
The first stable verison of the Python programming language is
officially released by Guido van Rossum. Though Python is not
strictly a web language, it had references to the web and to HTML in
its 1.0.0 release notes, and is often used in web applications to
manipulate, process, and format data.
April 5, 1994 Apr 05 1994
Spyglass Rewrites the Mosaic Browser
Realizing that they had a product they didn't know how to sell, NCSA
turns to Spyglass to begin distributing the Mosaic browser
commercially. Spyglass would eventually rewrite the Mosaic browser
and license it to companies like IBM and O'Reilly Media, before it
eventually became a foundational piece of Microsoft's Internet
Explorer.
Before the Wars, Browsers Were Everywhere
Published: April 21, 2020
Before browsers were truly cross-platform, there was a time when each
operating system had their browser of choice, and it was tailored to
the needs of those users.
April 20, 1994 Apr 20 1994
WebCrawler
Developed by University of Washington computer science student Brian
Pinkerton, WebCrawler was among the first search engines, and the
first to offer full text search of page content. Within six months,
it would serve over a million queries, and it was acquired by AOL
shortly after its first anniversary. WebCrawler would change hands
several more times over the years.
They Offered a Million Dollars to Surf The Web. Somebody Won.
Published: July 21, 2021
In 1995, it would be hard to believe that you could win a million
dollars from surfing the web. Then, AOL made it possible.
May 1, 1994 May 01 1994
Justin's Links from the Underground
Justin Hall creates his first website from his Swathmore dorm room.
He calls it Links from the Underground. It begins as a simple list of
links but soon expands to one of the earliest examples of a blog on
the web, with Justin sharing intimate details from his life every
day.
Why Do We Call it a Homepage?
Published: December 1, 2020
The word homepage came into popular use in the mid to late 90's, but
it's origin dates back to the web's beginning.
June 1, 1994 Jun 01 1994
HoTMeTaL
HoTMeTaL enters the market as one of the first WYSIWYG editors
created specifically for the web. The software is a hybrid of a text
and visual editor, that lets users edit a document using custom
styles, while still maintaining semantic HTML.
June 1, 1994 Jun 01 1994
InternetWorks
BookLink Technologies releases InternetWorks for Windows, the first
browser to feature tabbed browsing and advanced browsing history
features. Several months after its release, it would be acquired by
AOL for use inside the platform, until it was replaced by Netscape.
A Fun List of Browsers You've Never Heard Of
Published: January 5, 2021
There are the browsers that everyone's heard of. And then there are
some that, for whatever reason, faded away. These are the latter.
August 10, 1994 Aug 10 1994
Cool Site of the Day
Created by Glenn Davis as a way of featuring great new sites, Cool
Site of the Day, was updated daily with a new website on its
homepage. It would eventually garner millions of views a month,
before its popularity waned.
August 31, 1994 Aug 31 1994
Purple.com
The earliest example of a single serving website, Jeff Abrahamson
quietly launches Purple.com. The site is purple. Just purple. Though
it originally is released with a background color of #DD00FF, this is
later changed to #7D26CD to make the site more "purple" looking.
September 2, 1994 Sep 02 1994
Cyberia
Cyberia, widely regarded as the first official Internet cafe, opens
its doors in London. The space is originally intended as a space for
women to learn about the Internet, but it is open to all. The idea
catches fire, and cyber cafe's open up all over the world.
The Window at the Cafe
Published: July 3, 2017
Thanks to the web, in 1999 (or thereabouts), you might find yourself
at home, staring at the virtual window of your computer screen,
looking out the very real windows of your favorite cyber cafe.
September 29, 1994 Sep 29 1994
Tripod
The domain name for Tripod is registered, pre-dating most other free
web hosting services like Geocities and Angelfire. Tripod's explicit
goal is to give college students a way of setting up a spot for
themselves on the web, though it would eventually come to be known as
an easy-to-use service for free web homepages.
October 1, 1994 Oct 01 1994
W3C Interactive Talk
The W3C releases Interactive Talk, a form based discussion system.
Interactive Talk is the first attempt at creating software that
allows for two way conversation and is used mostly internally at the
W3C. In the years to come, it would become the template for forums
and message board software.
When Rotuma Came to the Web
Published: February 27, 2017
The web distributes access, access to information, and access to one
another. Access on the web is what brings us to small island off the
coast of Fiji, where web pioneers forged a unique community.
October 1, 1994 Oct 01 1994
The First Banner Ad
Hotwired launches with the web's first official banner ad, a simple
image with the text "Have You Ever Clicked Your Mouse Right Here?"
highlighting the forward thinking of AT&T. The ad brought users to a
landing page that took them on a virtual tour of worldwide art
museums.
Plagued by Ads
Published: January 22, 2018
Here's a message from the creator of the first-ever pop-up ad: It's
obvious now that what we did was a [...]
October 1, 1994 Oct 01 1994
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The World Wide Web Consortium is founded by Tim Berners-Lee with one
location at MIT, and one at the French Institute for Research in
Computer Science and Automation. The W3C is a standards body
organization, and makes recommendations to browsers for the
technologies that make up the web. Its members include standards
experts, browser makers, and multi-national companies with a stake in
the web's future.
October 1, 1994 Oct 01 1994
Time Warner Pathfinder
An early example of an online web portal, Pathfinder hosted content
from around 80 different content providers, major media publications
that syndicated content to the site. It would soon become famous for
an incredibly high turnover rate, but it would also be the starting
point for many renowned tech journalists and entrepreneurs. It was
officially shut down in April of 1999.
October 13, 1994 Oct 13 1994
Netscape Navigator
The first browser sold by Netscape Communications, Netscape Navigator
is released to wide and critical appeal. It would eventually become
the most popular browser in the world, until it is surpassed by
Microsoft during the Browser Wars.
October 17, 1994 Oct 17 1994
Perl 5
Larry Wall releases Perl version 5, a complete rewrite of the
programming language that was originally released in late 1987. Perl
5 was the first library to feature first class support for database
interfaces, and would soon be used to create an entirely new
generation of webpages and web-based applications.
The Linguist and the Programmer
Published: February 4, 2020
A history of Perl, Python, and the websites that rely on them.
October 27, 1994 Oct 27 1994
Hotwired
Wired Magazine's unveils its first online presence Hotwired.com,
which would become the first commercial online magazine. The site's
design, from the very first version, sits on the cutting edge, and is
redesigned on an almost yearly basis.
November 1, 1994 Nov 01 1994
Geocities
David Bohnett and John Rezner create a web hosting service called
Beverly Hills Internet. After giving away a fixed amount of web
storage for free, they change the name to Geocities and create a
number of "neighborhoods" for amateur webmasters to connect
through. Yahoo would later acquire Geocities in 1999, and take it
offline in 2009.
An Ode to Geocities
Published: January 2, 2018
Geocities is likely a site you've heard of. It may even have been a
site that you used. It's origin, and the movement it later inspired,
is an incredible story of self-expression and serendipity.
November 14, 1994 Nov 14 1994
Open Diary
Claudio Pinhanez begins writing daily entries on the MIT Media Lab
website. It becomes an early example of an online diary, and a
template for others to follow -- Pinahenz has one of the earliest
examples of his posts arranged in reverse chronological format, which
would become a standard format.
December 1, 1994 Dec 01 1994
.net Magazine
UK magazine publisher Future Publishing launches .net magazine.
Though the content is initially for Internet users of any kind
(including technologies like email and Gopher), it would eventually
center largely on articles for web designers and developers. The
magazine would go through several iterations before it was officially
ended in June of 2020.
1989-19941995-19961997-20002001-20062006-2020All
The History of the Web is a project by Jay Hoffmann.
Illustrations courtesy of Katerina Limpitsouni at unDraw.