When was the first web page released?
List of Internet pioneers
Nicola Pellow, one of the nineteen members of the "WWW Project" at CERN working with Tim Berners-Lee, is recognized for developing the first cross-platform internet browser, Line Mode Browser, that displayed web-pages on dumb terminals and was released in May 1991. She joined the project in November 1990, while an undergraduate math student enrolled in a sandwich course at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University). She left CERN at the end of August 1991, but returned after graduating in 1992, and worked with Robert Cailliau on MacWWW, the first web browser for the classic Mac OS.
History of the web browser
In 1992, Tony Johnson released the MidasWWW browser. Based on Motif/X, MidasWWW allowed viewing of PostScript files on the Web from Unix and VMS, and even handled compressed PostScript. Another early popular Web browser was ViolaWWW, which was modeled after HyperCard. In the same year the Lynx browser was announced – the only one of these early projects still being maintained and supported today. Erwise was the first browser with a graphical user interface, developed as a student project at Helsinki University of Technology and released in April 1992, but discontinued in 1994.
Internet Information Services
The first Microsoft web server was a research project at the European Microsoft Windows NT Academic Centre (EMWAC), part of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and was distributed as freeware. However, since the EMWAC server was unable to handle the volume of traffic going to Microsoft.com, Microsoft was forced to develop its own web server, IIS.
Nick.com
Nickelodeon launched their first online component as part of the America Online Kids Only channel in October 1995. Within a few years, a regular World Wide Web site came online, and became a strong promotional tool for Nickelodeon. The website's popularity grew and in March 1999, Nick.com became the highest rated website for children aged six to fourteen years old. Nickelodeon used the website in conjunction with television programmes which increased traffic. Nick.com also maintained a high level of respect for user privacy during the growth of the website.
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
NCSA quickly came to the attention of the worldwide scientific community with the release of NCSA Telnet in 1986. A number of other tools followed, and like NCSA Telnet, all were made available to everyone at no cost. In 1993, NCSA released the Mosaic web browser, the first popular graphical Web browser, which played an important part in expanding the growth of the World Wide Web. NCSA Mosaic was written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, who went on to develop the Netscape Web browser. Mosaic was later licensed to Spyglass, Inc. which provided the foundation for Internet Explorer. The server-complement was called NCSA HTTPd, which later became known as Apache HTTP Server.
History of Wikipedia
In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process. The name was suggested by Sanger on 11 January 2001. The "wikipedia.com" and "wikipedia.org" domain names were registered on 12 and 13 January, respectively, with "wikipedia.org" being brought online on the same day. The project formally opened on 15 January (""), with the first international Wikipedias – the French, German, Catalan, Swedish, and Italian editions – being created between March and May. The "neutral point of view" (NPOV) policy was officially formulated at this time, and Wikipedia's first slashdotter wave arrived on 26 July. The first media report about Wikipedia appeared in August 2001 in the newspaper "Wales on Sunday". The September 11 attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles.
Web search engine
Internet search engines themselves predate the debut of the Web in December 1990. The Who is user search dates back to 1982 and the Knowbot Information Service multi-network user search was first implemented in 1989. The first well documented search engine that searched content files, namely FTP files was Archie, which debuted on 10 September 1990.
Trance.nu
The first version of the site, released in late 2000, contained news, links and reviews. In the summer of 2001, trance.nu released their first community website, which included guest-books, private messages and profiles, which took them closer to their goal of promoting trance music. In 2005 Kevin Turner who had been writing for the website since 2001 became part owner along with Tommie, managing advertising and site's hosting infrastructure. In late summer of 2007, trance.nu released their fourth reincarnation of the site with Facebook-like features such as status updates, friends and galleries.
History of the World Wide Web
The first web page may be lost, but Paul Jones of UNC-Chapel Hill in North Carolina revealed in May 2013 that he has a copy of a page sent to him in 1991 by Berners-Lee which is the oldest known web page. Jones stored the plain-text page, with hyperlinks, on a floppy disk and on his NeXT computer. CERN put the oldest known web page back online in 2014, complete with hyperlinks that helped users get started and helped them navigate what was then a very small web.
History of the web browser
However, the explosion in popularity of the Web was triggered by NCSA Mosaic which was a graphical browser running originally on Unix and soon ported to the Amiga and VMS platforms, and later the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. Version 1.0 was released in September 1993, and was dubbed the killer application of the Internet. It was the first web browser to display images inline with the document's text. Prior browsers would display an icon that, when clicked, would download and open the graphic file in a helper application. This was an intentional design decision on both parts, as the graphics support in early browsers was intended for displaying charts and graphs associated with technical papers while the user scrolled to read the text, while Mosaic was trying to bring multimedia content to non-technical users. Mosaic and browsers derived from it had a user option to automatically display images inline or to show an icon for opening in external programs. Marc Andreessen, who was the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, quit to form a company that would later be known as Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape released its flagship Navigator product in October 1994, and it took off the next year.
HotWired
Hotwired (1994–1999) was the first commercial web magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of Wired Ventures, "Hotwired" was a separate entity from "Wired", the print magazine, and had original content.
Online wallet
The first World Wide Web server and browser, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, opened for commercial use in 1991. Thereafter, subsequent technological innovations emerged in 1994: online banking, the opening of an online pizza shop by Pizza Hut, Netscape's SSL v2 encryption standard for secure data transfer, and Intershop's first online shopping system. Immediately after, Amazon.com launched its online shopping site in 1995 and eBay was also introduced in 1995.
History of the Opera web browser
Version 2.0, the first public release of Opera, was released as shareware in 1996.
Webcomic
The first comics to be shared through the Internet were created in the mid-1980s. Services such as CompuServe and Usenet were used before the World Wide Web started to rise in popularity in 1993. Early webcomics were usually derivatives from strips in college newspapers, but when the Web became widely popular in the mid-1990s, more people started creating comics exclusively for this medium. By the year 2000, various webcomic creators were financially successful and webcomics became more artistically recognized. Unique genres and styles became popular during this period.
Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees
As the first film streamed across the Internet in 1993, the "New York Times" declaring "Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees" an “historic event.” That same year, the hypermedia version of the film, "Waxweb", was one of the first sites on the World Wide Web, and thus has been repeatedly cited as a milestone of Internet Art. "Waxweb" has been presented in museums worldwide. "Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees" was an early example of digital cinema, was one of the first independent films to be edited on a digital non-linear system, the Montage Picture Processor, and transferred from video to film for theatrical presentation.
The Nine Planets
The Nine Planets is a multimedia website by Bill Arnett containing information about the Solar System. It was one of the first examples of a multimedia website when it first appeared on the World Wide Web in 1994 and, as was common for high traffic websites at the time, it was widely mirrored. It contains encyclopedic information about the Solar System with a page for each of the major bodies illustrated with photographs, mostly from NASA.
History of the World Wide Web
Early websites intermingled links for both the HTTP web protocol and the then-popular Gopher protocol, which provided access to content through hypertext menus presented as a file system rather than through HTML files. Early Web users would navigate either by bookmarking popular directory pages, such as Berners-Lee's first site at http://info.cern.ch/, or by consulting updated lists such as the NCSA "What's New" page. Some sites were also indexed by WAIS, enabling users to submit full-text searches similar to the capability later provided by search engines.
Wiki
WikiWikiWeb was the first wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in Portland, Oregon, in 1994, and installed it on the Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web."
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
The first web accessibility guideline was compiled by Gregg Vanderheiden and released in January 1995, just after the 1994 Second International Conference on the World-Wide Web (WWW II) in Chicago (where Tim Berners-Lee first mentioned disability access in a keynote speech after seeing a pre-conference workshop on accessibility led by Mike Paciello).
Over 38 different Web access guidelines followed from various authors and organizations over the next few years. These were brought together in the "Unified Web Site Accessibility Guidelines" compiled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Version 8 of the "Unified Web Site Accessibility Guidelines", published in 1998, served as the starting point for the W3C's WCAG 1.0.
Social web
The first social networking sites, including Classmates.com (1995) and SixDegrees.com (1997), were introduced prior to social media sites. It has been argued that the transition towards social media sites began after the world's first online interactive diary community Open Diary was founded on December 19, 1998; currently still online after ten years, it has hosted over five million digital diaries. Open Diary successfully brought online diary writers together into one community as an early social networking site, and it was during this time that the term "weblog" was coined (later to be shortened to the ubiquitous "blog" after one blogger jokingly turned weblog into the sentence "we blog"). Some claim that this marked the beginning of the current era of social media, with "social media" being a term that entered into both common usage and prominence as high-speed Internet became increasingly available, growing in popularity as a concept and leading to the rise of social networking sites such as Myspace (2003) and Facebook (2004). It has been argued that this trend towards social media "can be seen as an evolution back to the Internet's roots, since it re-transforms the World Wide Web to what it was initially created for: a platform to facilitate information exchange between users."
Birkenhead Public Library
The North Shore Libraries catalogue was launched onto the Internet in June 1995. Shortly afterwards the branches began to demonstrate general internet usage to the public, then to roll out access. By May 1996 Birkenhead was having daily demonstrations. About this time, North Shore Libraries put up their first website. Datacom, whose main role was the provision of the libraries' online catalogue, created the website too, using AOLpress 1.2. This included the establishing of separate webpages for each branch.
Webring
A reborn website is Webringo.com, run as a hobby by the RingMaster. The first "webringo" first appeared in the Internet Archive on September 2006, but failed on September 2011.
The present RingMaster took it over as a hobby in August 2012.
WorldWideWeb
WorldWideWeb (later renamed to Nexus to avoid confusion between the software and the World Wide Web) was the first web browser and editor. It was discontinued in 1994. At the time it was written, it was the sole web browser in existence, as well as the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.
Internaut
The creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee enabled non-technical computer experts to use the Internet in a simple and quick way, making it accessible to billions of people around the world. Berners-Lee filed his original proposal for the Web on 12 March 1989, while working at CERN, and the project was first publicly announced on 6 August 1991 on the "alt.hypertext" newsgroup. Both of these dates have been celebrated by media as the "birthday of the Web" or "Internaut Day".
Web search engine
In the summer of 1993, no search engine existed for the web, though numerous specialized catalogues were maintained by hand. Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva wrote a series of Perl scripts that periodically mirrored these pages and rewrote them into a standard format. This formed the basis for W3Catalog, the web's first primitive search engine, released on September 2, 1993.
Online shopping
The first World Wide Web server and browser, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, opened for commercial use in 1991. Thereafter, subsequent technological innovations emerged in 1994: online banking, the opening of an online pizza shop by Pizza Hut, Netscape's SSL v2 encryption standard for secure data transfer, and Intershop's first online shopping system. The first secure retail transaction over the Web was either by NetMarket or Internet Shopping Network in 1994. Immediately after, Amazon.com launched its online shopping site in 1995 and eBay was also introduced in 1995. Alibaba's sites Taobao and Tmall were launched in 2003 and 2008, respectively. Retailers are increasingly selling goods and services prior to availability through "pretail" for testing, building, and managing demand.
World Wide Web
Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. In the underlying HTML, a hyperlink looks like this:
Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a "web" of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the "WorldWideWeb" (in its original CamelCase, which was subsequently discarded) in November 1990.
Search engine technology
The World Wide Web Wanderer, developed by Matthew Gray in 1993 was the first robot on the Web and was designed to track the Web's growth. Initially, the Wanderer counted only Web servers, but shortly after its introduction, it started to capture URLs as it went along. The database of captured URLs became the Wandex, the first web database.
Social media
GeoCities was one of the Internet's earliest social networking websites, appearing in November 1994, followed by Classmates in December 1995 and Six Degrees in May 1997. According to CBS news, Six Degrees is "widely considered to be the very first social networking site", as it included "profiles, friends lists and school affiliations" that could be used by registered users. Open Diary was launched in October 1998; LiveJournal in April 1999; Ryze in October 2001; Friendster in March 2002; the corporate and job-oriented site LinkedIn in May 2003; hi5 in June 2003; MySpace in August 2003; Orkut in January 2004; Facebook in February 2004; Yahoo! 360° in March 2005; Bebo in July 2005; the text-based service Twitter, in which posts, called "tweets", were limited to 140 characters, in July 2006; Tumblr in February 2007; and Google+ in July 2011. As operating systems with a graphical user interface, such as Windows 95 and Mac OS begin to emerge and gain popularity, this created an environment that allows for early social media platforms to thrive and exist.
BBC
The BBC's online presence includes a comprehensive news website and archive. The BBC's first official online service was the BBC Networking Club, which was launched on 11 May 1994. The service was subsequently relaunched as BBC Online in 1997, before being renamed BBCi, then bbc.co.uk, before it was rebranded back as BBC Online. The website is funded by the Licence fee, but uses GeoIP technology, allowing advertisements to be carried on the site when viewed outside of the UK. The BBC claims the site to be "Europe's most popular content-based site" and states that 13.2 million people in the UK visit the site's more than two million pages each day. According to Alexa's TrafficRank system, in July 2008 BBC Online was the 27th most popular English Language website in the world, and the 46th most popular overall.
History of wikis
, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN built the first hypertext client, which he called World Wide Web (it was also a Web editor), and the first hypertext server (info.cern.ch). In 1991 he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, marking the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.
History of Wikipedia
The first CD version containing a selection of articles from the English Wikipedia was published in April 2006 by as the "2006 Wikipedia CD Selection". In April 2007, "Wikipedia Version 0.5", a CD containing around 2000 articles selected from the online encyclopedia was published by the Wikimedia Foundation and Linterweb. The selection of articles included was based on both the quality of the online version and the importance of the topic to be included. This CD version was created as a test-case in preparation for a DVD version including far more articles. The CD version can be purchased online, downloaded as a DVD image file or , or accessed online at the project's website.
Web browser
The first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He then recruited Nicola Pellow to write the Line Mode Browser, which displayed web pages on dumb terminals; it was released in 1991.
Online doctor
The first medical consulting website in the US was WebMD, founded in 1996 by Jim Clark (one of the founders of Netscape) and Pavan Nigam as Healthscape. Currently, its website carries information regarding health and health care, including a symptom checklist, pharmacy information, drug information, blogs of physicians with specific topics, and a place to store personal medical information. As of February 2011, WebMD’s network of sites reaches an average of 86.4 million visitors per month and is the leading health portal in the United States.
History of Google
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. The first version of Google was released in August 1996 on the Stanford website. It used nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth.
Webuser
"Webuser" was started by IPC Media in 2001. The first issue appeared on 22 March. The bulk of the magazine's content consists of internet news, website reviews and features on web-related topics. It also features product reviews, free software, free apps, step-by-step workshops, and hints and tips for using computer software, hardware, and websites. The magazine is complemented by a website, launched in tandem in 2001.
350pages
350pages was developed by ZyNet Ltd which was formed in the UK in 1994 as one of the first Internet Service Providers in the UK and an early adopter of entirely server-based solutions. ZyNet co-developed ZyWeb, launched in 1997, which was one of the world’s first web-based website builders.
Dynamic web page
It is difficult to be precise about "dynamic web page beginnings" or chronology, because the precise concept makes sense only after the "widespread development of web pages": HTTP has been in use since 1990, HTML, as standard, since 1996. The web browsers explosion started with 1993's Mosaic. It is obvious, however, that the concept of dynamically driven websites predates the internet, and in fact HTML. For example, in 1990, before general public use of the internet, a dynamically driven remotely accessed menu system was implemented by Susan Biddlecomb, who was Director of Computer Support of the USC Health Care system at the University of Southern California BBS on a 16 line TBBS system with TDBS add-on.database.
History of wikis
The history of wikis is generally dated from 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. c2.com thus became the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
WIEM Encyklopedia
The first printed edition was released in mid-1990s, with the second in 1998, it contained about 66,000 entries and various multimedia add-ons. It was released online in 2000 by the Polish web portal Onet.pl on the basis of "Popularna Encyklopedia Powszechna i Multimedialna" ("Popular General and Multimedia Encyclopedia"). From 2004 to 2 March 2006 it was not free, however before and after it was free to access. As of the 9th online edition in 2006, it contains 125,000 entries.
World Wide Web
Scholars generally agree that a turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the US High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative and the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, one of several computing developments initiated by US Senator Al Gore. Prior to the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages and the web's popularity was less than that of older protocols in use over the Internet, such as Gopher and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Mosaic's graphical user interface allowed the Web to become, by far, the most popular Internet protocol. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in October 1994. It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet; a year later, a second site was founded at INRIA (a French national computer research lab) with support from the European Commission DG InfSo; and in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan at Keio University. By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was still relatively small, but many notable websites were already active that foreshadowed or inspired today's most popular services.
Online service provider
The importance of the online services industry was vital in "paving the road" for the information superhighway. When Mosaic and Netscape were released in 1994, they had a ready audience of more than 10 million people who were able to download their first web browser through an online service. Though ISPs quickly began offering software packages with setup to their customers, this brief period gave many users their first online experience.
Student Information Processing Board
SIPB set up a Web server at www.mit.edu in 1993, when the number of public web servers was roughly 100 and long before university Web sites became common. When MIT finally did set up an official Web site, it was at web.mit.edu.
History of Wikipedia
Wikipedia began with its launch on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, but the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open source) was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.
Apache HTTP Server
Originally based on the NCSA HTTPd server, development of Apache began in early 1995 after work on the NCSA code stalled. Apache played a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web, quickly overtaking NCSA HTTPd as the dominant HTTP server, and has remained most popular since April 1996. In 2009, it became the first web server software to serve more than 100 million websites. , it was estimated to serve 39% of all active websites and 35% of the top million websites.
Outlook on the web
Outlook Web Access was created in 1995 by Microsoft Program Manager Thom McCann on the Exchange Server team. An early working version was demonstrated by Microsoft Vice President Paul Maritz at Microsoft's famous Internet summit in Seattle on December 27, 1995. The first customer version was shipped as part of the Exchange Server 5.0 release in early 1997.
Makedonski Telekom
The first web portal, designed by MTnet (former Internet service provider of Makedonski Telekom), was released on December 7, 1999. At that time, it was a combination of MTnet product and general Internet content portal. It was the first portal of that kind, offering mostly daily updated news and information to Internet users in Macedonia.
Internet Archive
Brewster Kahle founded the archive in 1996 at around the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. In October 1996, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve the World Wide Web in large quantities, though it saved the earliest pages in May 1996. The archived content wasn't available to the general public until 2001, when it developed the Wayback Machine.
WorldWideWeb
Berners-Lee wrote what would become known as WorldWideWeb on a NeXT Computer during the second half of 1990, while working for CERN. The first successful build was completed by December 25, 1990, after only two months of development. Successive builds circulated among Berners-Lee's colleagues at CERN before being released to the public, by way of Internet newsgroups, in August 1991. By this time, several others, including Bernd Pollermann, Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff, and visiting undergraduate student Nicola Pellow – who wrote the Line Mode Browser – were involved in the project.
Privacy-invasive software
In the mid-1990s, the development of the Internet increased rapidly due to the interest from the general public. One important factor behind this accelerating increase was the 1993 release of the first browser, called Mosaic. This marked the birth of the graphically visible part of the Internet known as the World Wide Web (WWW) that was introduced in 1990. Commercial interests became well aware of the potential offered by the WWW in terms of electronic commerce especially because the restrictions on the commercial use of the Internet were removed which opened the space for companies to use the web as a platform to advertise and sell their goods. Thus, shortly after, companies selling goods over the Internet emerged, i.e. pioneers such as book dealer Amazon.com and CD retailer CDNOW.com, which both were founded in 1994.
List of early webcomics
Webcomics predate the World Wide Web and the commercialization of the internet by a few years, with the first webcomic being published through CompuServe in 1985. Though webcomics require a larger online community to gain widespread popularity through word-of-mouth, various webcomics pioneered the style of self-publishing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In "A History of Webcomics", cartoonist T. Campbell stated that "few strips from this period are remembered. But a few are notable early explorers of the art form."
Mobile Web
The first access to the mobile web was commercially offered in Finland at the end of 1996 on the Nokia 9000 Communicator phone via the Sonera and Radiolinja networks. This was access to the real internet. The first commercial launch of a mobile-specific browser-based web service was in 1999 in Japan when i-mode was launched by NTT DoCoMo.
The mobile web primarily utilises lightweight pages like this one written in Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) or Wireless Markup Language (WML) to deliver content to mobile devices. Many new mobile browsers are moving beyond these limits by supporting a wider range of Web formats, including variants of HTML commonly found on the desktop web.
German Wikipedia
The German edition of Wikipedia was the first non-English Wikipedia subdomain, and was originally named . Its creation was announced by Jimmy Wales on 16 March 2001. One of the earliest snapshots of the home page, dated 21 March 2001 (revision #9), can be seen at the Wayback Machine site. Aside from the home page, creation of articles in the German Wikipedia started as early as April 2001, apparently with translations of Nupedia articles. The earliest article still available on Wikipedia's site is apparently , dated May 2001.
P2pnet
p2pnet.net's mission statement says it went online in August 2002 as the first Internet web page to carry daily, frequently updated news stories, features and commentaries discussing developments in the p2p and digital media arenas.
History of the World Wide Web
In May 1994, the first International WWW Conference, organized by Robert Cailliau, was held at CERN; the conference has been held every year since. In April 1993, CERN had agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code royalty-free; this was in part a reaction to the perturbation caused by the University of Minnesota's announcement that it would begin charging license fees for its implementation of the Gopher protocol.
Studio for Interrelated Media
SIM has been an early adopter of Internet technologies and the program has embraced and integrated them into the SIM Department curriculum since before the existence of the Web, going back to the 80's. The first MassArt web server was created as an initiative of Dana Moser and the SIM Department in the mid-1990s with student participation in the design process. In February 2003, students Matt Karl and August "Kai" Kaiser, along with Professor Dana Moser, launched the first version of (http://sim.massart.edu), a community contact portal and face book, keeps track of student presentations and production schedules, links to syllabi, calendars, research guides, studio management information, discussion boards, and portfolios. For historical perspective, Facebook was launched February 2004.The site was built with an open source software stack (Linux/Apache/MySql/PHP) on commodity hardware and had a DNS entry created for it. Over the years, Matt Karl has continually re-written the interface for the SIM website, adapting to the specific needs of our department's faculty and students. At this point we have a custom-built Content Management System (CMS) that others have used as a reference. Our department emphasizes and promotes student participation, and we used the server to help in the instruction of students who were interested in network interactions and system administration. You can see a history of the development of the SIM site on the Wayback machine (https://web.archive.org/web/*/sim.massart.edu).
History of the web browser
The explosion in popularity of the Web was triggered in September 1993 by NCSA Mosaic, a graphical browser which eventually ran on several popular office and home computers. This was the first web browser aiming to bring multimedia content to non-technical users, and therefore included images and text on the same page, unlike previous browser designs; its founder, Marc Andreessen, also established the company that in 1994, released Netscape Navigator, which resulted in one of the early browser wars, when it ended up in a competition for dominance (which it lost) with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (for Windows).
Internet Explorer for Mac
The first version of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh operating system was a beta version of "Internet Explorer 2.0 for Macintosh", released on January 23, 1996 as a free download from Microsoft's website. This first version was based on the Spyglass Mosaic web browser licensed from Spyglass. Available for both 68k and PPC based Macs running System 7.0.1 or later, it supported the embedding of a number of multimedia formats into web pages, including AVI and QuickTime formatted video and AIFF and WAV formatted audio. The final version was released three months later on April 23. Version 2.1 released in August of the same year, was mostly aimed at fixed bugs and improving stability, but also added a few features such as support for the NPAPI (the first version of Internet Explorer on any platform to do so) and support for QuickTime VR. AOL 3.0 for Macintosh used the IE 2.1 rendering engine in its built-in web browser.
On November 5, 1996 Microsoft announced the release of a beta version of "Internet Explorer version 3.0 for Macintosh". This release added support for HTML version 3.2, Cascading Style Sheets, Java applets and ActiveX controls. The final version, made available on January 8, 1997, also added support for the SSL and NTLM security protocols and the PICS and RSACi rating systems that can be used to control access to websites based on content ratings. A problem with an operating system extension used in the Mac OS, called CFM68K Runtime Enabler, led to a delay in the release of the version 3.0 for Macs based on the 68k line of processors. Four months later on May 14, Microsoft released version 3.01 which included a version for 68k-based machines. This version also included features from the Windows version of Internet Explorer 4.0 such as AutoComplete and Monitoring Favorites that notified users when sites in their Favorites list have been updated. It also included support for JavaScript and introduced a Download Manager and a Cookie Manager.
At the 1997 Macworld Expo in Boston, on August 6, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates announced a partnership between Microsoft and Apple. Amongst other things, Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser instead of Netscape Navigator.
History of the Internet
A boost in web users was triggered in September 1993 by NCSA Mosaic, a graphical browser which eventually ran on several popular office and home computers. This was the first web browser aiming to bring multimedia content to non-technical users, and therefore included images and text on the same page, unlike previous browser designs; its founder, Marc Andreessen, also established the company that in 1994, released Netscape Navigator, which resulted in one of the early browser wars, when it ended up in a competition for dominance (which it lost) with Microsoft Windows' Internet Explorer. Commercial use restrictions were lifted in 1995. The online service America Online (AOL) offered their users a connection to the Internet via their own internal browser.
History of Wikipedia
Advances in information technology in the late 20th century led to changes in the form of encyclopedias. While previous encyclopedias, notably the "Encyclopædia Britannica", were book-based, Microsoft's Encarta, published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM and hyperlinked. The development of the World Wide Web led to many attempts to develop internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal for an online encyclopedia was Interpedia in 1993 by Rick Gates; this project died before generating any encyclopedic content. Free software proponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999. His published document "aims to lay out what the free encyclopedia needs to do, what sort of freedoms it needs to give the public, and how we can get started on developing it." On Wednesday 17 January 2001, two days after the founding of Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) GNUPedia project went online, competing with Nupedia, but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]".
Global SchoolNet
When the World Wide Web became available to the public in 1993, the FrEdMail Foundation became the Global SchoolNet Foundation and launched its first website, GlobalSchoolhouse.org. The following year the National Science Foundation also awarded Global SchoolNet a grant to introduce a desktop video-conferencing program called CU-SeeMe. CU-SeeMe was used for many educational video-conferences and in 1995 by World News Now for the first television broadcast live on the Internet, which featured an interview by World News Now anchor Kevin Newman and Andrés.Launched in 1995, the Projects Registry is historically significant. It contains more than 3,000 annotated listings, making it the oldest and largest online clearinghouse for teacher-conducted international e-learning projects. The Projects Registry is searchable by date, student age, location, curriculum, technology, and collaboration type. Educators worldwide can register to collaborate with partners on project-based learning a wide range of activities. Educators submit ideas for collaborative learning projects to the Projects Registry, which sends out a "Call for Collaboration" announcement. The number of classes or groups participating in any project varies. In one example of how classrooms collaborate on projects called Thinking Like Santa, elementary students write letters to Santa that are answered by older students at other schools. The Thinking Like Santa writing project dates back to 1981 and predates Free Educational Mail (FrEdMail), the predecessor to Global SchoolNet.
First International Conference on the World-Wide Web
The First International Conference on the World-Wide Web (also known as WWW1) was the first-ever conference about the World Wide Web, and the first meeting of what became the International World Wide Web Conference. It was held on May 25 to 27, 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference had 380 participants, who were accepted out of 800 applicants. It has been referred to as the "Woodstock of the Web".
World Wide Web
The first server outside Europe was installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California, to host the SPIRES-HEP database. Accounts differ substantially as to the date of this event. The World Wide Web Consortium's timeline says December 1992, whereas SLAC itself claims December 1991, as does a W3C document titled "A Little History of the World Wide Web". The underlying concept of hypertext originated in previous projects from the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex", which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think".
Mikseri.net
The first official version of Mikseri.net was released in 27.05.2001 after half a year of developing. After the release of the second official version the service started to grow rapidly.
Website builder
The first websites were created in the early 1990s. These sites were manually written in HTML.
World Wide Web
The proposal was modelled after the SGML reader Dynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University. The Dynatext system, licensed by CERN, was a key player in the extension of SGML ISO 8879:1986 to Hypermedia within HyTime, but it was considered too expensive and had an inappropriate licensing policy for use in the general high energy physics community, namely a fee for each document and each document alteration. A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first web browser (which was a web editor as well) and the first web server. The first web site, which described the project itself, was published on 20 December 1990.
World Wide Web Wanderer
The World Wide Web Wanderer, also referred to as just the Wanderer, was a Perl-based web crawler that was first deployed in June 1993 to measure the size of the World Wide Web. The Wanderer was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Matthew Gray, who, as of 2017, has spent a decade as a software engineer at Google. The crawler was used to generate an index called the "Wandex" later in 1993. While the Wanderer was probably the first web robot, and, with its index, clearly had the potential to become a general-purpose WWW search engine, the author does not make this claim and elsewhere it is stated that this was not its purpose. The Wanderer charted the growth of the web until late 1995.
Web design
In 1989, whilst working at CERN Tim Berners-Lee proposed to create a global hypertext project, which later became known as the World Wide Web. During 1991 to 1993 the World Wide Web was born. Text-only pages could be viewed using a simple line-mode browser. In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, created the Mosaic browser. At the time there were multiple browsers, however the majority of them were Unix-based and naturally text heavy. There had been no integrated approach to graphic design elements such as images or sounds. The Mosaic browser broke this mould. The W3C was created in October 1994 to "lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability." This discouraged any one company from monopolizing a propriety browser and programming language, which could have altered the effect of the World Wide Web as a whole. The W3C continues to set standards, which can today be seen with JavaScript. In 1994 Andreessen formed Communications Corp. that later became known as Netscape Communications, the Netscape 0.9 browser. Netscape created its own HTML tags without regard to the traditional standards process. For example, Netscape 1.1 included tags for changing background colours and formatting text with tables on web pages. Throughout 1996 to 1999 the browser wars began, as Microsoft and Netscape fought for ultimate browser dominance. During this time there were many new technologies in the field, notably Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and Dynamic HTML. On the whole, the browser competition did lead to many positive creations and helped web design evolve at a rapid pace.
World Wide Web Worm
The World Wide Web Worm (WWWW) was one of the earliest search engines for the World Wide Web (WWW). It is claimed by some to be the first search engine, though it was not released until March 1994, by which time a number of other search engines had been made publicly available. It was developed in September 1993 by Oliver McBryan at the University of Colorado as a research project.
History of the web browser
The first web browser, WorldWideWeb, was developed in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee for the NeXT Computer (at the same time as the first web server for the same machine) and introduced to his colleagues at CERN in March 1991. Berners-Lee recruited Nicola Pellow, a math student intern working at CERN, to write the Line Mode Browser a cross-platform web browser that displayed web-pages on old terminals and was released in May 1991.
History of the World Wide Web
By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was also a Web editor), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server (http://info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that described the project itself. The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well. However, it could run only on the NeXT; Nicola Pellow therefore created a simple text browser, called the Line Mode Browser, that could run on almost any computer. To encourage use within CERN, Bernd Pollermann put the CERN telephone directory on the web—previously users had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers.
The Best Page in the Universe
"The Best Page in the Universe" originated from a text document that Maddox wrote in 1996 aptly named "fifty things that piss me off!" He gave the list to several people on EFnet's #coders, and the positive response led him to create the website.
History of the World Wide Web
In keeping with its birth at CERN and the first page opened, early adopters of the World Wide Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories such as Fermilab and SLAC. By January 1993 there were fifty Web servers across the world. In April 1993 CERN made the World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis. By October 1993 there were over five hundred servers online. Two of the earliest webcomics started on the World Wide Web in 1993: "Doctor Fun" and "NetBoy".
List of early webcomics
The first strip of David Farley's "Doctor Fun" was uploaded on September 23, 1993. Campbell described "Doctor Fun" as the "first regular web comic", as "NetBoy" did not have a regular schedule during its first year. Mike Wean's "Jax & Co." was first uploaded in 1994. Using Javascript, it was the first webcomic to implement a "page turning" interface that encourages readers to read the comic in order. Soon, this effect was recreated by simple HTML, such as with "Argon Zark!", which launched in June 1995 and is occasionally listed among the earliest comics to be published on the World Wide Web.
Horizon Weekly
Horizon Weekly was the first Armenian publication on the international scene to have its own website during the 90s. However, during the first three years of the 21st century, the weekly could no longer be found on the internet. In 2003, the Central Committee presented a detailed report regarding Horizon's site and www.horizonweekly.ca was launched in May 2004.
History of wikis
The website Wikipedia, a free content encyclopedia, was in January 2001, and quickly became the most popular wiki, which it remains to this day. Its meteoric rise in popularity (it entered the top ten most popular sites in 2007) played a large part in introducing wikis to the general public. There now exist at least hundreds of thousands of wiki websites, and they have become increasingly prevalent in corporations and other organizations.
Firefly (website)
The Firefly website was launched in October 1995. It went through several iterations but remained a community throughout. It was initially created as a community for users to navigate and discover new musical artists and albums. Later it was changed to allow users to discover movies, websites, and communities as well.
Sociology of the Internet
The Internet is a relatively new phenomenon. As Robert Darnton wrote, it is a revolutionary change that "took place yesterday, or the day before, depending on how you measure it." The Internet developed from the ARPANET, dating back to 1969; as a term it was coined in 1974. The World Wide Web as we know it was shaped in the mid-1990s, when graphical interface and services like email became popular and reached wider (non-scientific and non-military) audiences and commerce. Internet Explorer was first released in 1995; Netscape a year earlier. Google was founded in 1998. Wikipedia was founded in 2001. Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube in the mid-2000s. Web 2.0 is still emerging. The amount of information available on the net and the number of Internet users worldwide has continued to grow rapidly. The term 'digital sociology' is now becoming increasingly used to denote new directions in sociological research into digital technologies since Web 2.0.
WebKit
The code that would become WebKit began in 1998 as the "KDE HTML" (KHTML) layout engine and "KDE JavaScript" (KJS) engine. The WebKit project was begun within Apple by Don Melton on June 25, 2001, as a fork of KHTML and KJS. Melton explained in an e-mail to KDE developers that KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant. KHTML and KJS were ported to OS X with the help of an adapter library and renamed WebCore and JavaScriptCore. JavaScriptCore was announced in an e-mail to a KDE mailing list in June 2002, alongside the first release of Apple's changes. WebCore was announced at the Macworld Expo in January 2003 by Apple CEO Steve Jobs with the release of the Safari web browser. JavaScriptCore was first included with Mac OS X v10.2 as a private framework which Apple used in their Sherlock application, while WebCore debuted with the first beta of Safari. Mac OS X v10.3 was the first major release of Apple's operating system to bundle WebKit, although it had already been bundled with a minor release of 10.2.
Larry Page
Page and Brin used the former's basic HTML programming skills to set up a simple search page for users, as they did not have a web page developer to create anything visually elaborate. They also began using any computer part they could find to assemble the necessary computing power to handle searches by multiple users. As their search engine grew in popularity among Stanford users, it required additional servers to process the queries. In August 1996, the initial version of Google, still on the Stanford University website, was made available to Internet users.By early 1997, the BackRub page described the state as follows:
Responsive web design
The first site to feature a layout that adapts to browser viewport width was "Audi.com" launched in late 2001, created by a team at razorfish consisting of Jürgen Spangl and Jim Kalbach (information architecture), Ken Olling (design), and Jan Hoffmann (interface development). Limited browser capabilities meant that for Internet Explorer, the layout could adapt dynamically in the browser whereas for Netscape, the page had to be reloaded from the server when resized.
MarilynManson.com
Marilyn Manson were one of the first bands to actively engage with their audience through online communication. Their first website was launched at 3pm PTD on September 4, 1998, and was created by ArtistDirect. This website contained numerous references to the numbers 1 and 5, similar to the artwork for the band's then-upcoming album, "Mechanical Animals"—which featured the band's name stylized as Mar1lyn Man5on. The album was also released on September 15. This website featured a bulletin board system, an interactive discography with lyrics and sound clips, photos, as well as an online store. The site also hosted regular contests, with a different fan being awarded two tickets for every North American date of the band's "Mechanical Animals Tour". On September 9, 1998, the band's eponymous singer took part in one of the world's first-ever live video chats, answering numerous questions submitted by fans.
Web design
In 1996, Microsoft released its first competitive browser, which was complete with its own features and tags. It was also the first browser to support style sheets, which at the time was seen as an obscure authoring technique. The HTML markup for tables was originally intended for displaying tabular data. However designers quickly realized the potential of using HTML tables for creating the complex, multi-column layouts that were otherwise not possible. At this time, as design and good aesthetics seemed to take precedence over good mark-up structure, and little attention was paid to semantics and web accessibility. HTML sites were limited in their design options, even more so with earlier versions of HTML. To create complex designs, many web designers had to use complicated table structures or even use blank spacer .GIF images to stop empty table cells from collapsing. CSS was introduced in December 1996 by the W3C to support presentation and layout. This allowed HTML code to be semantic rather than both semantic and presentational, and improved web accessibility, see tableless web design.
XOS Webtop
The first version of xOS Webtop started development in December 2010, and later became available on May 14, 2011 after several months of development. When the initial webtop did not work entirely as planned, XProduct posted a version of xOS 2.0 Desktop Edition online for public use and quickly went back into development to work on what would later become xOS Webtop 3.0.
List of early webcomics
The first major webcomic portal, Big Panda, started in the second half of the 1990s. Big Panda hosted over 770 webcomics, including "Sluggy Freelance" and "User Friendly", which started in 1997. Big Panda's discontinuation resulted in the formation of Keenspot in 2000. In 1995, "Dilbert" became the first syndicated comic strip to be officially published through the Internet.
NetSurf
After five years of development, the first stable version of the browser was released on 19 May 2007 to coincide with the Wakefield RISC OS show. Version 1.0 was made available for download from the project's web site and the software was sold on CD at the show. After the release of NetSurf 1.0 there were two point-releases, which largely comprised bug fixes. NetSurf 1.1 was released in August 2007 and in March 2008 the NetSurf 1.2 release was made available.
Principia Cybernetica
The Principia Cybernetica Web, which went online in 1993, is one of the first complex webs in the world.
It is still viewed as one of the most important sites on cybernetics, systems theory, complexity, and related approaches.
World Wide Web Virtual Library
The World Wide Web Virtual Library was the first index of content on the World Wide Web and still operates as a directory of e-texts and information sources on the web. It was started by Tim Berners-Lee creator of HTML and the World Wide Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva. Unlike commercial index sites, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert. It is sometimes informally referred to as the "WWWVL", the "Virtual Library" or just "the VL".
Yeshimebeth T. Belay
Ethiopian Yellow Pages was officially launched in 1993. The first edition contained 80 pages. The directory has since been made accessible through the internet. Washington DC Council declared September 15, 2007 to be “Ethiopian Yellow Pages Day” in the District of Columbia. The directory was described by the Washington Post in June 2011 as an "Immigrant’s Directory ... an all-purpose tool for cultural acclimation."
Ibiblio
Also in 1992, sunsite.unc.edu became one of the first web sites on the internet. Today, it is still the host for a copy of the oldest web page known in history.
Digital Archaeology (exhibition)
The Project was the first website to connect and share documents on personal computers via the internet. It was published by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1991 and used HTML 1.0. Its first web address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which described the WorldWideWeb project.
WorldWideWeb
The source code was released into the public domain on April 30, 1993. Some of the code still resides on Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT Computer in the CERN museum and has not been recovered due to the computer's status as a historical artifact. To coincide with the 20th anniversary of the research centre giving the web to the world, a project began in dexter at CERN to preserve this original hardware and software associated with the birth of the Web.
Software widget
Web widgets have unleashed some commercial interest, due their perceived potential as a marketing channel, mainly because they provide interactivity and viral distribution through social networks. The first known web widget, Trivia Blitz, was introduced in 1997. It was a game applet offered by Uproar.com (the leading online game company from 2000 - 2001) that appeared on over 35,000 websites ranging from GeoCities personal pages to CNN and Tower Records. When Uproar.com was acquired by Vivendi Universal in 2001, the widget was discontinued.
Italian Wikipedia
As early as March 2001, Jimmy Wales, the creator and co-founder of the original English language Wikipedia, had proposed the creation of parallel Wikipedia projects in other languages. The Italian language version was among the first ones to be created, in May 2001. The original URL was italian.wikipedia.com, while the standardized ISO 639 address it.wikipedia.com became active a few days later. Afterwards, Wikipedia sites switched their domains from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org. The very first pages (circa five hundred) were simply untranslated copies from the English-language Wikipedia; the first edits were made from 11 June 2001 onwards.
Patrick Naughton
In June and July 1994, after three days of brainstorming with John Gage, the Director of Science for Sun, James Gosling, Bill Joy, Naughton, Wayne Rosing, and Eric Schmidt, the team re-targeted the platform for the World Wide Web. They felt that with the advent of the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, the Internet was on its way to evolving into the same highly interactive medium that they had envisioned for cable TV. As a prototype, Naughton wrote a small browser, WebRunner, later renamed HotJava.
Quirks mode
The structure and appearance of a web page is described by a combination of two standardized languages:
However, most older web browsers either did not fully implement the specifications for these languages or were developed prior to the finalization of the specifications (Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0 for the Macintosh platform, released in 2000, was the first major web browser with full support for CSS Level 1, for example). As a result, many older web pages were constructed to rely upon the older browsers' incomplete or incorrect implementations, and will only render as intended when handled by such a browser.
Computer-assisted language learning
The emergence of the World Wide Web (now known simply as "the Web") in the early 1990s marked a significant change in the use of communications technology for all computer users. Email and other forms of electronic communication had been in existence for many years, but the launch of Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, in 1993 brought about a radical change in the ways in which we communicate electronically. The launch of the Web in the public arena immediately began to attract the attention of language teachers. Many language teachers were already familiar with the concept of hypertext on stand-alone computers, which made it possible to set up non-sequential structured reading activities for language learners in which they could point to items of text or images on a page displayed on the computer screen and branch to any other pages, e.g. in a so-called "stack" as implemented in the HyperCard program on Apple Mac computers. The Web took this one stage further by creating a worldwide hypertext system that enabled the user to branch to different pages on computers anywhere in the world simply by pointing and clicking at a piece of text or an image. This opened up access to thousands of authentic foreign-language websites to teachers and students that could be used in a variety of ways. A problem that arose, however, was that this could lead to a good deal of time-wasting if Web browsing was used in an unstructured way (Davies 1997: pp. 42–43), and language teachers responded by developing more structured activities and online exercises (Leloup & Ponterio 2003). Davies (2010) lists over 500 websites, where links to online exercises can be found, along with links to online dictionaries and encyclopaedias, concordancers, translation aids and other miscellaneous resources of interest to the language teacher and learner.
Timberwolf (web browser)
The first release was made public in June 2010. On July 23, 2012, the project was declared to be complete and the money (€6732.72) was transferred to the Friedens.
ViolaWWW
ViolaWWW is a discontinued browser, the first to be popular for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was first released in 1991/1992 for Unix and acted as the recommended browser at CERN, where the WWW was invented, but eventually lost its position as most frequently used browser to Mosaic.
History of webcomics
The earliest known graphical comic distributed solely through the Internet was Eric Millikin's "Witches and Stitches", which he started uploading on CompuServe in 1985. By self-publishing on the Internet, Millikin was able to share his work without having to worry over censorship and demographics. In 1986, Joe Ekaitis first uploaded "T.H.E. Fox" on CompuServe, a furry webcomic drawn on his Commodore 64.
History of the web browser
UdiWWW was the first web browser that was able to handle all HTML 3 features with the math tags released 1995. Following the release of version 1.2 in April 1996, Bernd Richter ceased development, stating "let Microsoft with the ActiveX Development Kit do the rest."