Happy birthday www.

[No_0ne]

Thirty years ago, the project that resulted in the World Wide Web was initially proposed by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at  CERN, the European research laboratory in Switzerland.  The first webpage has been re-created at Cern, using a line-mode browser simulator of the type developed for the project.  Check out these links for some blasts from the past:

http://info.cern.ch/

http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

https://twitter.com/EUCouncil/status/1105431223617445888

 

 

Edited March 13, 2019 by No_0ne

[hipower]

What?? No credit no mention of Tennessee's Favorite Son...the actual inventor of the internet.

That's just terrible! Not giving Al even a mention.

[OLDNEWBIE]

 The cat's out of the bag now but....Glad I grew up in a time without www! Poor kids today. Too much tech. 

[Chucktshoes]

1 minute ago, OLDNEWBIE said:

 The cat's out of the bag now but....Glad I grew up in a time without www! Poor kids today. Too much tech. 

I couldn’t agree more. I really think that in the end we will come to the conclusion that for all of the great things the internet brings, the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze. 

[Jeb48]

I agree that the long term effects may not be worth the connivence, I'm to old to have grown up with it, but was an early adopter. Created my first web page in the mid 90s after hearing a presentation on this new thing. Total number of web sites at the time was measured in the hundreds. There was actually a site you could go, that showed you all the new sites that came online so you could check them out.

[No_0ne]

As a teacher, we had heard about the "internet" by the early 90's, but had no real idea what it was.  We had a form of email that used the telnet network, it rarely worked. In @1993, our central office arranged an all-day county wide training session at the local university on "the internet".  They had computers, projectors and screens set up to demonstrate how it all worked, however they couldn't get a connection (dial-up maybe?) so we sat for 6 hours while the presenters told us what we would see if the thing had actually worked.  I do remember late in the day, they finally got a connection, used a very primitive  browser (Netscape?) to log on to the Web, even managed to get one or two pictures and graphics to load.  I wasn't particularly impressed with it ...

Edited March 13, 2019 by No_0ne

[Omega]

I took my first computer class in 91 or 92, back before windows, it was on DOS and we had to code all our own programs and "internet" was through a very slow phone based modem.  Though social media is, IMO, ruining the internet, the internet does have it's merit if you self limit what you do on it.  In my pocket, I now have the ability to calculate trajectories on the fly, get up to date weather, access maps, find my location and call for help if I've fallen and can't get up. And of course I can take a picture of my harvest and post it before I've even left the field.

[No_0ne]

My first class was in 1979 at what was then Memphis State University, a course in "Fortran", a now-extinct scientific language.  We wrote programs on "punch cards" which basically noted each character written by punching a hole in a specific location on card stock.  I screwed up and took the "honors" version of the class, which meant our programs normally took a few hundred cards as opposed to the more typical 50-75 of the normal class. Fortran was a language which was very particular about spaces, commas, symbols and the like, if anything was mis-typed or out of place the machine would kick that card out and abort the program.  It goes without saying that on punch card machines there is no "backspace" key, and in 1979 I couldn't type very well even using my one finger method.  I hated that class so much that after it was over, I dropped out of college ...

[Ronald_55]

21 minutes ago, No_0ne said:

My first class was in 1979 at what was then Memphis State University, a course in "Fortran", a now-extinct scientific language.  We wrote programs on "punch cards" which basically noted each character written by punching a hole in a specific location on card stock.  I screwed up and took the "honors" version of the class, which meant our programs normally took a few hundred cards as opposed to the more typical 50-75 of the normal class. Fortran was a language which was very particular about spaces, commas, symbols and the like, if anything was mis-typed or out of place the machine would kick that card out and abort the program.  It goes without saying that on punch card machines there is no "backspace" key, and in 1979 I couldn't type very well even using my one finger method.  I hated that class so much that after it was over, I dropped out of college ...

No punch carts directly for me, but I did Fortran and Assembly Language (Binary). I think Paschal was the worst for me. I kept missing commas that were the line break characters. I did all this as electives in my business major because I saw computers as a big part if the future. 

I toyed around with friends that were on BBSs in the early 90s, got on the internet in college just after that. Saw eBay gets its start, signed up on PayPal when you still got referal bonuses to get friends to join, and build web pages in notepad before all the flash and other addons.

I love the information we can access,and the ease of shopping  but I really don't like social media. I actually remember telling a buddy way back when the internet was mainly academic that I bet it would not be a year before it was filled with porn. I was not far off. I did not envision the crushing weight that is internet advertising though. You can't go on a page without tons of ads showing up.

Some days I am not so sure that turning it all off would be a bad thing.