[HN Gopher] World Wide Web (1991)
___________________________________________________________________
World Wide Web (1991)
Author : geuis
Score : 243 points
Date : 2024-04-27 07:01 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (info.cern.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (info.cern.ch)
| votiv wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_bef...
| CPLX wrote:
| Haven't thought about IUMA in awhile. That might have been the
| first site I went down the rabbit hole with.
| jaza wrote:
| I remember the first time I ever saw the WWW, I think it was
| 1996, I was in 5th grade (in Australia). The whole class sat
| down cross-legged in the "computer room", where the school's
| brand-new Internet connection had just been installed (was
| probably a single 14.4k modem). The teacher opened Netscape
| Navigator (on an Apple Macintosh) and clicked on a bookmark. We
| all sat there spellbound, waiting patiently. About half an hour
| later, the front page of nasa.gov had finished loading! We all
| thought it was amazing.
| qingcharles wrote:
| In 1993 I remember most of the web sites being "How to write
| HTML."
|
| I see one guy there with photo.net -- and you might wonder why
| he didn't register photo.com. In '93 basically every domain was
| available, for free (there were no fees yet). Dotnet domains
| were definitely seen as nerdier and more exotic and rarer
| beasts than their dotcom brothers and the value of a domain was
| little understood.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Kind of awesome that some of the websites from W3 Servers
| (https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html) are
| still online, just a couple though.
| geuis wrote:
| I also love that the original servers were written in a few
| lines of C. We've come so far since then, in plus and minus
| ways.
| anthk wrote:
| I've seen web servers written in Maclisp (almost close to
| Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp) under ITS and PDP 10's.
|
| http://up.dfupdate.se/httpd%20html
| datascienced wrote:
| First there was W3 then Web 2.0 then web3.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| I have found 3 with useful pages but half a dozen which just
| give a blank page. And a few which are a copy of the 1992 web.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Wow, such a marvel of engineering, which is absolutely readable
| both on my 4k landscape monitor and my portrait smartphone!
|
| Does anybody knows, what CSS and JS magic did the guy used here?
| ainiriand wrote:
| Sarcasm will not be tolerated.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Without joking, it's the only page I've opened in a long long
| time that was readable on mobile without lots of pinching and
| scrolling.
| MrDresden wrote:
| HN is pretty usuable, except maybe for some of the small
| touch surfaces.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Every webpages starts out responsive and adaptive by default.
| :-)
| niemenmaa wrote:
| Kinda reminds me of this saga (lots of foul language ahead)
|
| - http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
|
| - http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
|
| - https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/
| fragmede wrote:
| You joke, but the first web page came out in 1991. CSS wouldn't
| come out into 1996, and JavaScript was 1995.
| Closi wrote:
| That was the joke, don't worry we get it ;)
| zilti wrote:
| Technically, there was DSSSL already though. It is missed
| dearly.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Whoa, that was unexpected.
|
| But technically, DSSSL (OpenJade) was used to render pages
| to print/PDF and never ran as part of a browser stack
| (unless I've overlooked some stubborn Schemer implementing
| it in JS or emscripten or sth; but don't tell HN's Lisp
| fraction to given them ideas ...) Unlike SGML itself, which
| is mentioned in TBL's docs as the basis for HTML markup.
| Btw SGML _does_ have its own styling language in link
| processes which basically just re-uses regular attribute
| declaration syntax, plus has some explicit state machine
| representation (aka "links").
|
| But yeah, using a Lisp derivative would've definitely
| prevented the syntax proliferation that is CSS, its
| terseness/magic, and habit of re-use of property names for
| different purposes as a way to sneak in complex layouting
| features by understated surface syntax changes.
| RGamma wrote:
| They use the very efficient noop framework. Go check it out
| here:
| throw310822 wrote:
| Did someone already make a monument of these words? They would
| look great carved in stone, with markup and everything:
| <BODY> <H1>World Wide Web</H1>The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a
| wide-area<A NAME=0 HREF="WhatIs.html"> hypermedia</A>
| information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal
| access to a large universe of documents.<P> Everything
| there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly
| to this document, including...
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I wonder about that name attribute. Was it a tabindex
| equivalent?
| guessmyname wrote:
| The name attribute is used to create a named anchor. [1]
|
| When using named anchors you can create links to a specific
| section on a page, instead of letting your viewer scroll
| around to find what he/she is looking for. Named anchors are
| called bookmarks in Expression Web.
|
| NOTE: Not supported in HTML5. Use the global id attribute
| instead. Specifies the name of an anchor
|
| You can also use the name attribute on the server side to
| identify the fields in form submits. [2][3]
|
| [1] https://www.expression-web-tutorials.com/anchor-tags.html
|
| [2] https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_name.asp
|
| [3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1397613
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Thanks, I remember it was replaced by the ID attribute, but
| in this case, it is not being used as a named anchor. It
| seem more like an index.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| The name attribute can be an arbitrary string, so a
| number is a valid name. Even if you dont link to the
| anchor yourself, adding a name will make it possible for
| others to link to it in the future.
|
| I belive anchors were initially designed to be two-way,
| but it turned out to be more useful to link to headlines
| rather than links, so links and link targets were
| seperated.
| mopsi wrote:
| And even there we can see copyright issues:
| Information by Subject Music Song lyrics
| (apparently disabled for copyright reasons)
|
| https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overvie...
| tempodox wrote:
| I still remember how lyrics.wikia.com had to shut down because
| of copyright issues. It was a site where users could edit and
| publish song lyrics.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| And I'm still mourning the loss of the Online Guitar Archives
| (OLGA); I still have printouts of all the songs I attempted
| to learn on guitar.
| bobvanluijt wrote:
| Same! That was a sad day
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| Similar feelings when Napster (the original cool version)
| and Grooveshark shut down.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| I think most of the OLGA tabs have been moved to Ultimate
| Guitar (which supposedly compensates authors or has other
| ways to be copyright-compliant?) and if you look for semi-
| unknown songs from the 90s you can still find them, in
| their beautiful notepad-like glory.
|
| Up to a few years ago it also didn't have an atrocious
| interface with plenty of antipatterns. Now, on the other
| hand...
| zarazas wrote:
| Did you post this because of Kneipenquiz from Rocket Beans? :D
| geuis wrote:
| Nope. Was looking at some old abandonware games from when I was
| a kid and that got me thinking about the first time I got
| online on the actual web, not aol or whatever we had back then.
| Then I remembered that the original site used to be still
| running and checked if it was active.
| CynicusRex wrote:
| The first website is still more user-friendly, faster, and
| prettier than most of the Web today.
|
| "Web4 should run on LaTeX. The World Wide Web is broken: it is
| dominated by a handful of websites, nearly everything is financed
| by ads, bloated tech needlessly slows down surfing, NFTs and
| blockchain are digital cancer, et cetera. Stop it. Just stop it."
| --https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/web4.html
|
| --
|
| POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
| (https://indieweb.org/POSSE)
| anthk wrote:
| Just use Gemini, or Gopher. Gopher can be read with POSIX
| netcat+echo+less or gawk. Gemini, with Gawk and OpenSSL:
|
| http://git.vgx.fr/gem.awk/
|
| On chess, telnet/netcat to freechess.org 5000. Use awk+nc or
| gawk to change the replace the chess pieces into UTF8 if you
| care.
|
| No JS, No ads, no nothing. A 486 can still play networked
| chess, lurk at HN or Reddit via gopher://hngopher.com and
| gopher://gopherddit.com, read news via gopher://magical.fish
| (and even translate things from English to French or Spanish)
| play Nethack/Slashem, emulate the GB, play MP2 and MOD files,
| use IRC, use chat services against bitlbee.org with an IRC
| client, telnet to SDF and do crazy things with Emacs (from
| reading novels to comment on Mastodon/IRC and even play IF with
| Malyon), also, coding in Elisp.
|
| Also, when the Gopher->Gemini bridge gets ready, you will be
| able to browse UTF8 Gemini and _web_ sites wth just Lynx and a
| dumb 386 with a relative modernish GNU /Linux, such as a
| minimal install of Delicate Linux. Add gemini://gemi.dev on top
| of that and even modern web will be at least article-(text)
| readable, such as Ars Technica, Wired and The Register. And the
| bandwidth usage will be good for any user, too. No more data
| caps with tethered connections, gopher/gemini can be
| ridiculously small on bw.
|
| With gemini://gemi.dev I could read news far away from a city,
| near train tunnels. The size of a web page was reduced from
| near a MB to few KBs.
| GoofballJones wrote:
| I remember when this first dropped and I was like "this will
| never catch on. The Internet is using telnet to log into
| different systems....and FTP...and Usenet...and gopher...and IRC.
| This World Wide Web is just a gimmick.
|
| Hey, I never said I was a visionary.
| gjvc wrote:
| erroneous leading space on the first link. splendid.
| jak2k wrote:
| We should go back to the roots. The modern web is too bloated.
| simonh wrote:
| I'm continually astounded by the incredible shoddiness and
| unfitness for purpose of so many commercial web sites. The more
| time goes on, you'd think figuring out how to make a
| functioning web site would become better known, but no. In many
| ways it gets worse.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Yes and no. A modern house is ridiculously bloated compared to
| what my ancestors lived in or even a tent but I wont give it
| up.
|
| You only really need a kitchen and somewhere to take a dump
| (defecate), separate from the kitchen. The kitchen gets you
| warmth and shelter from most weather in temperate to arctic
| climes, shade in warmer climes. The bog need not be "inside"
| but should be separate for obvious sanitary reasons. Oh and
| you'll need clean water, something to eat and something to burn
| for cooking and heat.
|
| Tesco and co (supermarkets) can bugger off for being too
| bloated. I'll be going in with a knife (veg and fruit), spear
| and bow and arrow (food that moves). Mind you the bow is a bit
| excessive unless the food that moves is dangerous at close
| quarters 8)
|
| Having said that: FAANG n that really is bloat that could be
| excised with little of importance lost from the web _sigh_. How
| on earth have we found ourselves in a world where "going
| viral" is a stretch goal and an indicator of success? GOPHER
| and WAIS and USENET were good enough, back in the day. We still
| have email for some reason and I can still run my own, from
| home, but not everyone can.
|
| In around 1994 I was asked by my boss to investigate this new
| web thing. I had a Windows 3.11 PC. I telnetted to my
| departmental VAX. From that I telnetted to the organization's
| X.25 PAD. From that I could get from JANET to some exotic
| American NIST related thing ... then I would hit a GOPHER menu
| (I think) and after a bit of jiggery pokery I hit the web.
|
| I could not really tell the difference, as an end user, between
| WWW and GOPHER/WAIS. The hyperlinks were simply distributed
| (through the text) instead of a list of menus. Instead of a
| page of a menu of links you got text with links in it - all a
| bit chaotic. Basically, a tree becomes a web. I told the boss
| it looked a bit better than the menus of G/W but nothing really
| new. I think I even said to him that the status quo is
| organized like his hard disc and hence comprehensible but the
| web is a bit mad and freeform.
|
| Do bear in mind that this is in a console, the browser was yet
| to become mainstream.
|
| I'm not an important commentator on internets for obvious
| reasons! I completely missed the point that free form and a bit
| mad is exactly what was required for the web to go viral in no
| uncertain terms.
| taulien wrote:
| This page [1] is still "Under Construction", I am wondering, when
| they will finish it :)
|
| [1]: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Server.html
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I had the chance to work at CERN at that time (student, then
| PhD). I remember navigating on a demo site and being the
| visionary I am, I thought "ah, cool. Time for lunch".
|
| I also mined some 100 bitcoins when they just appeared, out of
| curiosity. I forgot about the program running and came back to
| see these ~100 bitcoins. Being the visionary I am, I thought "ah,
| cool. Let's clean up and time for lunch".
|
| Some people are doomed to be executors and only catch up.
| Keyframe wrote:
| any recent of dem visions?
| webdevver wrote:
| just out of curiosity, what were you doing before you had lunch
| today?
| elderlybanana wrote:
| Maybe reading about passkeys imminent death on HN?
| cubefox wrote:
| Or reading an article about AI being overhyped?
| linearrust wrote:
| Given his trajectory, probably was busy in the lab and about
| to find the cure for cancer. Then lunch happened.
| elwell wrote:
| GP was reading about my new LLM startup, remarked how it
| seemed 'cool' and then went off to lunch. BTW, did I mention
| I'm looking for investors?
| badsectoracula wrote:
| That reminds me of my reaction when i first saw Minecraft back
| in the TIGSource forums: "this looks like a level editor i made
| a few years ago, it was fun to make levels with it but i doubt
| anyone is going to buy a level editor" :-P.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Wanna have lunch sometime?
| ironmanszombie wrote:
| I, too, mined some bitcoins when it first appeared. My computer
| at the time was housed in a case of plywood that I'd made. I
| wonder if my crappy computer from over 20 years ago has at
| least a Bitcoin in it? Well, time for qat now. Will dig it out
| later.
| hnfong wrote:
| 1900s grandfather: I buried a sack of gold coins in my
| backyard.
|
| 2000s grandfather: The computer that I used to mine bitcoin
| is probably in the pile of junk inside the garage.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| > The computer that I used to mine bitcoin is probably in
| the pile of junk inside the garage
|
| It's funny because it's true:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55658942
| xorcist wrote:
| Maybe "true" isn't the best word to use. There are too
| many stories like this for them all to be true. Great
| story though.
| kolinko wrote:
| At that time you even had bitcoin faucets that gave you
| 0.5-1-5 btc to play around. Or you could just run a miner
| on your gpu and get 50btc if you ran it for a few days or
| so - a ton of people probably have those on some
| partition on an old laptop or sth.
| xorcist wrote:
| Yes, but we know where those coins are now: in
| circulation. And we have a good grasp how many that is
| and how many could possibly on on those shelved laptops.
| It is literally how every coin in circulation was minted
| as there is no central party, only your peer devices.
| gbolcer wrote:
| LMAO. I have about 150 Bitcoins sitting on an old hard
| drive at the bottom of the local dump. I guess someone
| would try to dig them up if it ever hits a million, but
| doubtful they could recover them much less unlock them.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| Its 1992. A friend of mine has asked me to meet with someone,
| to discuss the idea of 'selling things through the web'. I
| didn't like the idea - "this is not what the Internet is for...
| and the web is too esoteric, difficult to set up and use,
| TCP/IP WinSock blahblah", and I dismiss the thing entirely on
| an ideological basis. That friend goes on to participate in
| something that later became .. Amazon.
|
| Its 1994. I turn on the modem back at an ISP I've just built,
| in a place called Los Feliz. After a few months of putting out
| the fires, I decide "this ISP thing is balls", and I leave. The
| guy I built the first data center for, goes on to be worth 300
| million buckaroonies.
|
| Its 1996. An associate has flown us to San Francisco for the
| day, to meet a guy who has been trying to get his auction site
| launched for the past year. We have lunch, we discuss the whole
| concept of 'online auctions', I dismiss it as being unviable
| "because latency" and legal jurisdiction. Okay, a few years
| later, I buy a synthesizer on EBay. I still have it, to remind
| me of myopia.
|
| Its 1997. I get hired to make a bookmark-management site,
| called "Storease". I build it, but I don't like it. People will
| find things, then add their URL to our site, and collect
| "Storease". "This will be too expensive to scale properly
| unless someone comes up with data-centers as a commodity..."
| Something about this rubs me up the wrong way. Could've been
| delicious, though.
|
| Its 2010. I buy a few bitcoins, for _30 cents each_ , and keep
| them around long enough to make .. 300 bucks. I'm proud of
| myself for selling 10 bitcoins and making 300 bucks.
|
| This stuff happens. Its a difficult thing for technologically
| inclined ideologues to see the woods for the trees.
|
| Its 2023. I am still ignoring crypto. All my friends are
| millionaires. I'm just glad to have a new version of JUCE to
| play with ...
| imperialdrive wrote:
| Similar. Just along for the ride. It's still rewarding and
| can last a long time in good health. Hope you're enjoying it
| too!
| YZF wrote:
| - I thought Google was too expensive at its IPO.
|
| - "Cloud" seemed like marketing nonsense to me.
|
| - I still think bitcoin is a scam.
|
| On the plus side I did end up working for some tech companies
| that did very well. No complaints.
|
| It's really hard (read as impossible) to predict the future.
| Efficient markets and all that. If it was clear that Google
| would go where it went then it'd be priced even higher. Even
| if you knew that "selling things online is the future" in
| 1992 it's not always clear how to act on that knowledge. You
| could have gone bust with pets.com or something.
|
| Fast forward to today. What is today's Google? What is
| today's "cloud"? What is today's bitcoin? Someone is saying
| something about something, someone is right, many are wrong.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Honestly, this is like I am reading my bio.
|
| I had several of these along the way (including having a
| proposal to create a company but I was too busy courting a
| girl - they sold it for around 100MEUR and split in in three
| :))
|
| I work in high tech (bleeding edge) and spend my time
| automating my home and writing open source (when not
| working). My wife, from time to time, mentions how much I
| could do and my son cannot understand why I do not want to go
| further up the company pyramid. But I am happy, I have all
| the money I need and can now sit in front of my screen
| answering to HN while keeping an eye on the dinner I am
| cooking.
|
| So yeah, lots of lost opportunities but the partying was wild
| :)
|
| And yeah, I am still ignoring bitcoins when the guys in my
| team are making money (but live on an emotional rollercoaster
| :))
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Oh my. Same here. I mined quite a few bitcoins on a friend's PC
| a long time ago. Then we tried to do something with them but
| you couldn't even buy a beer. So we forgot about the bitcoins
| and the disk is probably on a trash heap somewhere now.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Time to get the IBN 5100 and go back in time.
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| What a pity (
| jbverschoor wrote:
| How about lunch sometimes?
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| Reminds me of the all-time classic (now) HN discussion on
| Dropbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 as I got
| older I realized that, you can never ever hope to choose what
| will be successful or important, and that is true down to the
| most seemingly small action you can make. The world is simply
| too complex and interdependent for that.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Sounds fake. This ain't Reddit.
| xcv123 wrote:
| No. It was that easy to mine bitcoins back then and just
| throw them away. Interesting but worthless at the time.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| From your profile it looks like you are even older than me.
|
| I find it strange that you did not go through similar stories
| - tech in the 90s was rather eventful. Maybe you were at the
| wrong place?
| cubefox wrote:
| My reaction when I first heard of the concept of a "wiki" where
| everyone is allowed to edit some post (curiously before I heard
| about Wikipedia): I thought such a system would immediately be
| ruined by vandalism. It didn't occur to me that there may be
| way more people who undo vandalism than there are vandals.
|
| Or when I first heard about Twitter. My immediate reaction was:
| "I'm unusually open to wacky Web 2.0 ideas, but even I have to
| admit you can't say anything of substance in just 140
| characters." And indeed, looking up some random tweets seemed
| to confirm this suspicion. Interestingly, this wasn't just my
| reaction. A lot of us "tech enthusiasts" had this opinion about
| Twitter.
| cxr wrote:
| > My reaction when I first heard of the concept of a "wiki"
| where everyone is allowed to edit some post (curiously before
| I heard about Wikipedia): I thought such a system would
| immediately be ruined
|
| There are people who think that today, despite well-known
| existence proofs we have to the contrary.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Let me tell you about my grand scheme, circa 1991 or
| thereabouts, of downloading small images from BBSes and
| embedding them inline with the text.
| defaultcompany wrote:
| Yeah I remember using NCSA mosaic to browse the early web and
| thinking "what's the point of this we already have FTP and
| archie".
| gerdesj wrote:
| I only mined around 1 BT when they were "worth" about PS5 and
| then lost the wallet because I ran out of floppies for my
| transfer of data from old to new PC or I forgot about it (which
| is more likely).
|
| I thought the www looked a bit mad and disorganized when I
| first telnetted to it via the US from UK.
|
| Time for lunch.
| MaintenanceMode wrote:
| I too am similarly gifted. Back in the usenet days a group I
| was on received its first spam. There was some discussion about
| whether this type of thing would get out of control. I
| confidently proclaimed that there was no way spam would ever be
| more than a minor nuisance.
| Keyframe wrote:
| How's this different than gopher? At least gopher is well-
| established; This will never catch on.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There's probably a Usenet thread with this exact text in some
| archive...
| thomasahle wrote:
| Gopher also has a much more familiar UI with navigation menus.
| This "hyperlink" idea is typical ivory tower thinking. Nobody
| outside of academia will want to use this.
|
| And support for images/multimedia? The internet bandwidth this
| requires will limit it to just a few elite institutions.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| My exact feelings on seeing Cello browser.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I remember finding the WWW in 1993 when it wasn't really more
| than about a thousand pages at CERN.
|
| And I didn't see what was so special about it, and didn't do
| anything with it... I mean Gopher had archie so it was
| searchable. And I didn't care much about physics.
| ricksunny wrote:
| Does anyone know if TBL was inspired by Vannnevar Bush's Memex
| proposal at all?
|
| Progressively through time we hear references to Memex as
| 'predicted computers', 'predicted search' 'predicted hypertext',
| "predicted AI",
|
| to which I would add 'predicted tagging' and 'predicted
| recommendation engines'
|
| [note the steady progression of our own technology through time
| reflected in the above list]
|
| And there's still at least one more Memex prediction of something
| useful that I feel we still haven't produced yet.
|
| _edit_ (Ah I see that the wikipedia article for TBL mentions
| Memex front-and-center, so a pretty trivially identifiable
| association I guess.)
| BirAdam wrote:
| According to his own words, he wasn't aware of Bush, Engelbart,
| or Nelson when he started working on Enquire, but hypertext
| more generally was known to him. He became aware of those other
| men and their work over time and their ideas helped to refine
| his own.
| lmihaig wrote:
| We should be forever grateful that places like CERN exist, which
| strive for open science and open source.
| mihaaly wrote:
| It is so refreshing seeing content first simple pages from time
| to time in the cacophony of attention seeking (obstructively
| injecting themselves) pages with zero or negative
| (misinformation, misdirection, pure lies and harm) content. It is
| no fun using the World Wide Web anymore, it is a pure danger zone
| and struggle.
|
| Except exceptions like this one here.
|
| One of my sorrow how formally respectable mediums like BBC suck
| up to this crap trend. Their scrolling articles where your
| fingers get tired while the emptionally manipulative and
| exagerating nothing with active shiny presentation goes is
| something I ever finished, but once I tried. Rubbish! (and
| unluckily their content too in general, even for the simpler text
| articles, increasingly, all oppinion random quotes dipped in
| thick dripping emotional manipulation). Have to read The
| Economist instead. Not cheap but there the content matter still
| over the form.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of
| useful/interesting websites. Webrings, category-sorted
| directories with an entry 'portal' & similar.
|
| These mostly disappeared as the web's content size exploded,
| maintaining those directories became too much work, and search
| engines were just so much easier / better to find what you're
| looking for.
|
| These days: ad & tracking infested bloated trash _everywhere_ ,
| and search engine's usefulness have declined. Putting the few
| "small web" gems out there in a curated directory, might just
| be easier than trawling through heaps & heaps of junk (or in
| near-future: have AI assistant do that for you).
|
| A kind of white-listing, if you will.
| anthk wrote:
| I remember a text mode BBC site a la https://lite.cnn.io and
| https://text.npr.org. Now it's not any more.
|
| Gemini with gemini://gemi.dev/waffle.cgi opening the full BBC
| URL (with https:// on front) would be the closest to that.
|
| Edit:
|
| gemi.dev/cgi-
| bin/waffle.cgi/links?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews
|
| Try Lagrange in a PC or Android and open this URL.
| chuckadams wrote:
| > Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated
| lists of useful/interesting websites.
|
| HN and other link-aggregation forums are more or less a
| crowdsourced version of that.
| niek_pas wrote:
| Look at how fucking fast this page loads. No newsletter banners.
| No ads. Easy to read, responsive. Why can't more of the web be
| like this.
| potency wrote:
| Because expectations have increased since the early 90's and
| servers cost money.
| adriangrigore wrote:
| I also jokingly refer to
| https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ShellScript.html as
| the first version of my static site generator https://mkws.sh/
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "If you know the perl language, then that is a powerful (if
| otherwise incomprehensible) language with which to hack
| together a server."
|
| Perl was the first language I wrote dynamic websites in around
| ~1993 so this made me laugh.
| adriangrigore wrote:
| Things have sure gotten better now. :D
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I found the syntax interesting
| /HEPDATA/REAC?P+PBAR list of reactions involving p and pbar (?)
|
| https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ServerWriter.htm...
| tejohnso wrote:
| Interesting comments from the FAQ regarding resource discovery:
|
| May...1992...
|
| "By the way, it would be easy in principle for a third party to
| run over these [hyperlink] trees and make indexes of what they
| find. Its just that noone has done it as far as I know because
| there isn't yet an indexer which runs over the web directly."
|
| ...
|
| "In the long term, when there is a really large mass of data out
| there, with deep interconnections, then there is some really
| exciting work to be done on automatic algorithms to make multi-
| level searches."
|
| Altavista came out in 1995, Google Search 2 years later.
| johnc_ wrote:
| Will never take off.
| marstall wrote:
| "there is no 'top' to the web" <= words that were mind blowing to
| me at the time
| simonw wrote:
| It would be neat to catch up on what all of the people listed on
| https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/People.html have been doing
| for the last thirty years. I bet they are an interesting bunch!
| tomxor wrote:
| I was hoping this was still being served on the same Next Cube
| with the "do not power down!!" label, but the HTTP headers
| strongly suggest not.
|
| Maybe it's pointlessly romantic but I like the idea of machines
| and software continuing to perform their job well past their life
| expectancy. Voyager 1 has to be the most celebrated example.
| Maybe it's because it makes me care more about crafting things if
| they are a little less ephemeral than the modern software churn
| would make us believe.
| lokimedes wrote:
| Last time (~2012) I saw that machine, it was exhibited at the
| CERN Computing Center lobby. Its sibling, Tim's workstation was
| exhibited at CERN's public museum. Both long disconnected.
| twilightzone wrote:
| Even works in reader mode.
| pbd wrote:
| wow. looks cool.
| ape4 wrote:
| No rush, but maybe somebody could fix this stray tag at the end
| <A NAME=49 HREF="...">anonymous FTP</A> , etc.</A>
| dailykoder wrote:
| >You can try the simple line mode browser by telnetting to
| info.cern.ch (no user or password. From UK JANET, use the
| Gateway).
|
| doen't work for me :(
| jpcfl wrote:
| Sad. Here's a simulator: http://line-
| mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
| linearrust wrote:
| No blinking neon text that could send a blind man into an
| uncontrolled violent seizure?
| layer8 wrote:
| From the news link, this is actually from November 1992.
| flenserboy wrote:
| At the beginning of that Fall term one of my classmates pulled up
| next to me while I was working on a NeXT box in our lab. He had
| me pull up an app he'd had a hand in working on over his summer
| in Switzerland. "Check it out -- this is going to be great. So
| much better than Gopher," he said. After following a few links I
| replied, "It's nice, but doesn't provide much more than Gopher
| right now." "No -- but it will." It was fun to be able to see
| things in the earliest days of the web, & to see how it grew.
| Never would have guessed at the time that the browser would
| become the centerpiece of most people's computer use.
| peterbmarks wrote:
| I remember having an O'Reilly book titled "The Whole Internet".
| Hilarious concept. Gopher was pretty cool at the time.
| mhandley wrote:
| I upgraded the UCL CS webserver to CERN/3.0 running on a Sun
| Sparcstation 10 back in 1994, and it has been in production use
| ever since. The hardware got replaced at least once (our sysadmin
| has a large pile of spare mid-1990s Sparc hardware), and the NFS
| server storing the data has changed more than once, but it's the
| same software install still running on 1990s Sun hardware. It
| needed some minor patches for Y2K, but nothing in the 24 years
| since. Will be 30 years this summer. Needless to say as it
| predates SSL, it's no longer our primary server, but it does
| still serve everyone's home pages. % nc
| www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80 HEAD /staff/M.Handley/ HTTP/1.0
| HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows MIME-Version: 1.0
| Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 22:06:54 GMT
| Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 9973 Last-
| Modified: Thu, 07 Dec 2023 13:26:26 GMT
| MaintenanceMode wrote:
| That's so amazing. That Sun sparc 10 was a beast of a machine.
| I had one running until 2020. It was seemingly unstoppable. It
| broke my heart to send it off to recycling, it's weird being
| emotional about a computer. It had been serving web pages (on-
| and-off) since 1997.
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