
The WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release (1991) - bleakgadfly
https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.announce/browse_thread/thread/6af5808c84a771fc/042c02b1b5992dd3?pli=1
======
simonw
"This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty
whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access."

~~~
famousactress
Who would have thought that such a short time later it would be the revolution
in information access that we take for granted, and the lack of warranty bit
that'd we'd be fighting to uphold.

~~~
chc
Fighting to uphold the lack of warranty? What?

~~~
famousactress
Censorship/SOPA reference. Warranty in the sense that they mean recourse if
you're disappointed with the product, or it doesn't perform as advertised.
Obviously, TBL was commenting on code quality.. but in general it made me
think about how much jeopardy the spirt of freedom that use-at-your-own-risk
tends to come with, is in lately.

------
js2
To give a taste of how quickly this exploded. This is 1991. By 1995 I was
working at a small ISP. The ISP existed only because there was demand to get
on the web. I started my masters in 1996 but was then lured away by a job at
Cox Interactice Media, a several hundred person division that Cox Enterprises
setup just so it could have a web presence. That's just 5 years after this
annoucement, and well, we know where it went from there. All for something
that didnt exist when I graduated highschool.

Try to imagine inventing somthing with that kind of impact that quickly.

~~~
TylerE
Interesting. What part of Cox's web division in particular? I'm actually
working for a small group of newspapers that were spun off of Cox about 3
years ago.

~~~
js2
Cox Interactive Media. The division doesn't exist anymore. At the time it ran
the web sites for the media properties (newspapers, TVs, radio stations).
[http://web.archive.org/web/19991013054542/http://cimedia.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/19991013054542/http://cimedia.com/)

------
DanielKehoe
I was writing for NeXTWorld magazine at the time I saw TimBL's newsgroup
announcement.

I mentioned it to a colleague at the magazine, John Perry Barlow, who emailed
his friend Mitch Kapor at EFF, saying "[Kehoe] passed on the following about
something called World Wide Web, which sounds rather like Project Xanadu
emerging from the Matrix almost without design. This could be cool." Here's
the original email (screen grab from my NeXT machine):
<http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/images/barlow.gif>

I emailed TimBL and told him I'd asked my editors to let my co-editor and I
write about it. TimBL was enthusiastic but warned me, "We have to avoid any
embarrassment about CERN code being 'given away for free' when developed with
European taxpayers' money. We are working on this but don't say anything in
print about how one gets hold of the code without checking for latest
developments first!" Here's the original email from TimBL:
<http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/images/timbl.gif>

TimBL had no reason for concern -- my editors decided the story was not
newsworthy and we never ran the piece.

I was working on a book proposal at the time, titled "Plugging Into the
Planet," which introduced the Internet and explained how computer users could
get connected to Usenet, Gopher, and WAIS. I added a section on the WWW.
Random House, Bantam, and other major publishers turned it down. I was told
books about modems didn't sell well.

When I saw TimBL's announcement, I felt it was an important project and worthy
of notice. Still, I thought that calling it the WorldWideWeb was vainglorious;
after all, how worldwide was it really, running on the handful of NeXTs that
had Internet connections? It wasn't until John Markoff's December 1993 article
in the New York Times describing NCSA Mosaic for Windows that popular interest
in the web burgeoned. Even then, there were very few ISPs, modems were slow,
and there was no easy way to create and serve web pages. That we now have the
web is a testament to both the power of TimBL's vision and the enthusiasm of
everyone who encountered it.

~~~
luke_s
Its a bit off topic, but I am curious about a bit of slang used. John Perry
said "... sounds rather like Project Xanadu emerging from the Matrix ... ".

I'm familiar with project Xanadu and for a moment I just presumed "the matrix"
was a reference to the movie. But then I realized the e-mail was sent in 1991
...

What did he mean by "the matrix"?

~~~
DanielKehoe
I love John Perry Barlow's use of language. As you guessed, he was referring
to Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu hypertext project. "The Matrix" was a term used
by researcher John Quarterman (and the title of Quarterman's seminal book) to
designate the totality of all the world's computer networks, which in 1991
were not all linked together (FidoNet, the Internet, DECnet, others long
forgotten). As far as I know, Quarterman appropriated the term from William
Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, where "the Matrix" was the global
computer network that was the locus of cyberspace. I think Barlow, in his
visionary way, was referencing Neuromancer. The Wachowski brothers' borrowing
of the term "the Matrix" for their 1999 film corrupted a term that had meaning
in the early 1990s. Now, shall we say, it is deprecated.

------
tambourine_man
There was a turning point for me, somewhere between the purchase of a 33.6
modem and upgrade from 30 monthly hours to unlimited dial-up, when the Web
changed from a curiosity to the best thing ever.

The meme back then was that you could go to the Louvre from your home
computer. But before those two upgrades it felt like it would be faster and
cheeper to just take a plane. I had much more fun with CD-ROMs from computer
magazines.

The other essential turning point was the discovery that the phone company
would only charge you a single pulse from midnight to 6 am. So at 12:01, the
horde of nerds would dispute the few available lines of the ISPs to try to get
connected. No taximeter, no Moms inadvertently grabbing the phone and
disconnecting you. That kind of shaped a whole generation's habits and
schedules.

At about the same time there was also a change of culture. I remember having
to call people to tell them I sent an email a few days ago. When people began
answering me the same day, things started to get interesting. And then there
was SPAM and we lost that forever :)

Or least until Gmail came along and rescued us with its magical bayesian
filter and petabytes of data.

~~~
harrylove
re: grabbing the phone and disconnecting.

I remember that like it was yesterday. God, it was so painful to be in the
middle of a download--even just a web page--and have someone pick up the
phone. Aaaargh! Then you do the modem 2-step, wait for the lo-fi screaming
ghost, and back on the web you would go.

People born today will ask, "You had to connect through your phone? And the
phone was connected to the wall?"

~~~
sbov
And on a somewhat related note: not being able to get any phone calls while
connected to the internet either.

Onetime I got the busy signal for 3 hours straight before walking 10 miles
home because my mom was waiting for my call while on the internet.

------
tambourine_man
Google demands a login to allow me to read the article on my iPhone.

Not the WWW that Tim imagined.

~~~
js2
This is because you have an expired google login cookie. It's annoying and is
not specific to iOS. Delete that cookie and you can read w/o logging in. On
the desktop, I almost always use a Chrome incognito window for Google Groups.

~~~
tambourine_man
Didn't work. Deleted Cookies, Cache and databases.

It still knows who I am and asks for password.

------
Aqueous
"We also released an iPhone version of the WorldWideWeb Application.
Unfortunately, we were turned down by Apple for acceptance into the iTunes
store."

~~~
zerostar07
Careful there. Had Apple bought WWW (It was a NeXT-only application anyway) we
would have had a lot more justin biebers.

------
Shark-Snap
Initially Tim Berners-Lee wanted to call it 'The Information Mine' -
abbreviated to 'TIM'

~~~
harrylove
That sounds like Google's mission. "The information. Mine."

------
VikingCoder
Here's my personal story:

I distinctly remember a professor showing me a web browser (not Gopher!)
before I left for a second-semester and summer co-op, my Sophomore year in
college (starting around January/February, and running until August). I
graduated High School in May of 1991, so then I was a Freshman in college in
August of 1991 (right around when this was posted.) I was a Sophomore in
August of 1992, and it would have been right around December of 1992 when I
saw the browser, if my memory is correct.

I've been trying to figure out if my memory is flawed... And if not, what
browser he would have been using.

It couldn't have been NCSA Mosaic, because 0.1a wasn't out until June 1993:

ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Windows/Archive/MosaicHistory.html

Or Netscape Navigator, because 0.9 wasn't out until 1994.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#Release_hist...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#Release_history)

So, December of 1992, probably not a NeXT (I don't think), certainly an
X-Windows system. Probably a Sun.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web>

That leaves Erwise, ViolaWWW...

Or maybe my memory is flawed. Maybe I didn't see the graphical WWW browser
until after I got back from my co-op, so some time around August of 1993. :(

If I remembered the professor's name, I could email him and ask!

I wonder how many people saw the WWW before me? If you look at how long people
have been web browsing, what percentile am I in? 99.9%? 99.99%? 99.999%? How
many nines, damnit! :)

Maybe it was a NeXT. I know my school later had NeXT boxes. That would
certainly make my remembered timeline more plausible...

~~~
juiceandjuice
My boss wrote MidasWWW, a Motif/X based browser for Unix. It was out in
November 1992.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidasWWW> <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-
Lee/FAQ.html#browser>

> Where does Mosaic fit in? > A: As I understand it, Marc Andreessen at NCSA
> was shown ViolaWWW by a colleague (David Thompson?) at NCSA. Marc downloaded
> Midas and tried it out. He and Eric Bina then wrote their own browser for
> unix from scratch. Later, several other folks at NCSA joined the team to
> port the idea to Mac and PC. As they did, Tom Bruce at Cornell was writing
> "Cello" for the PC which came out neck-and-neck with Mosaic on the PC.

------
Kilimanjaro
'also remote indexes to be interrogated for lists of useful documents'

Now I know why the home page of most web sites is named index.html

------
derwildemomo
what are you doing? nothing, just creating http, html and a browser and
client. that's what i call a "getting things done" attitude.

~~~
a_a_r_o_n
Newton: can't describe physics effectively, invents calculus.

Berners-Lee: can't collaborate effectively with physicists, invents the web.

~~~
zerostar07
Interesting to note that he has a degree in Physics himself, and the idea was
for physicists to collaborate with each other.

------
Achshar
wait, can anyone please tell me the story behind this post? i understand it is
about some primitive text browser for web but why (and how) is it on google
groups? google wasn't even there at that time. and how can one add a post and
date it in the past?

~~~
icebraining
_primitive text browser for web_

Browser, server and editor. His original view was that everyone would publish
from their own machines in a P2P way.

~~~
dexen
That `editor' part cannot be stressed enough. It's a shame the PUT and PATCH
HTTP methods aren't widely used nor open for use.

~~~
ominous_prime
I haven't seen a PATCH used in any real fashion, but PUT is now a fairly
standard part of most HTTP APIs.

~~~
losvedir
> _but PUT is now a fairly standard part of most HTTP APIs._

Is it? I know Rails uses "put" for editing a model, but it was my
understanding that it simulates this via a hidden field in the form and
actually issuing a POST request.

Why does it behave that way? I thought it was because many browsers don't
support PUT, but maybe it's for other reasons?

~~~
ominous_prime
I'm referring to an HTTP API (RESTful if you will). HTML forms only support
GET and POST, but browsers support GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE via
XMLHttpRequest.

Also, access to a lot of services' APIs don't come from browsers at all.

~~~
losvedir
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize it was only HTML forms limited
to GET and POST and not the browser as a whole.

------
spinchange
Some intrepid blogger ought to do a round-up of all the seminal Usenet posts
like this. Thinking of Linus announcing Linux, Larry announcing his
pagerank/webcrawler, etc... Although, it seems like something like this is
probably already out there (?)

~~~
jonny_eh
Where are the seminal annoucements being made today? HN? Reddit? It can't
still be Usenet, right?

~~~
untog
A while ago, someone linked to the HN post entitled "My weekend project called
Quora", or something to that effect. Was very interesting to see.

------
gonnakillme
wow. Does anyone know where one could get that tarball?

~~~
Maxious
<http://browsers.evolt.org/?worldwideweb/NeXT>

Lots of other "classic" browsers also mirrored there!

~~~
DanBC
JWZ has some information about running ancient browsers, which tend to fail
because of the HOST header.

([http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-
brows...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-browsers-
day/))

Google has a handy list of other interesting early announcements to Usenet:

(<http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html>)

~~~
there
I remember the version of IE (2?) that shipped with some version of Windows
didn't support the Host header and as a result, couldn't access microsoft.com
properly, which one had to do to upgrade IE.

~~~
yuhong
I think you're referring to NT4 which shipped with IE2. IE3 was released a
month later and was included with some later CDs.

------
Yhippa
Does anybody remember "Internet in a Box"
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box>)? I remember back in the day
I was so excited to purchase my own browser software. My how things have
changed.

~~~
Nutella2
I think I still have the box somewhere at home. I should donate it to the
Computer History Museum.

------
DanielBMarkham
I remember -- I think it was 1992 -- being one of the first "normal" people on
the internet. Got in through a service called Delphi.

It had a menu option to use www. The screen came up with white text on a black
background. Some words were in reverse -- black text on a white background.

I remember thinking "Weird. What would anybody ever use this stuff for?"

After all, it wasn't like it was as useful as ftp, telnet, gopher, etc. It was
just a bunch of text in a weird format. (Remember there was no mouse then. I
imagine you had to tab to get on the links? Never found out, because I
couldn't figure out what to do with it.)

------
zerostar07
I have actually used it. What a terrible browser! Every link opens new window?
No thanks! and so many menus.. the only good thing is the included editor (i
love colored text)...

Sorry Tim, i will try ViolaWWW instead which looks more promising. In every
case, nothing beats CD-ROMs

------
cpfohl
So cool. I love seeing this sort of history. Thanks for posting!

------
phatbyte
The web's big bang ?

------
shingen
It'll never catch on.

~~~
DrCatbox
It needs traction and to solve the chicken-and-egg problem. There is not many
documents to look at, and to make people look at all these documents you need
many people to put up their documents on such a proposed web, and in a special
form!

~~~
zalew
it needs a better name to get recognition. 'double-u double-u double-u' is
hard to pronounce.

~~~
Angostura
Back in the mid 90s a colleague embarked on a (fruitless) attempt to get all
the people he knwe to call their Web hosts 'web' as in web.example.com. A
shame that he failed, I feel.

~~~
literalusername
Unless httpd is running on a different server from your second-level domain,
and your primary use of your second-level domain is something other than
serving http, then the use of a www subdomain is silly. Changing it to "web"
makes it no less silly. There once was a movement to do away with it, but
sadly <http://no-www.org/> appears to have been essentially abandoned -- or at
least very rarely updated.

~~~
foxit
You wouldn't believe how many webservers still can't direct you to the page
without the www, I'm afraid.

------
kumarshantanu
This story is from 1991. Mentioning this in the title would be helpful.

~~~
mattdeboard
A year ago there would have been no question this was a joke. Now, I'm not so
sure.

~~~
Confusion
Well, my first thought was: "what hubris is this?", before taking note of the
archaic name and the domain name and figuring it was probably an interesting
old Usenet post. Adding [1991] would perhaps prevent someone from missing it
through a similar line of thought?

~~~
freehunter
Yeah, I saw the name and [google.com] (missing the [groups.] part) and the
first comment quoting the revolution... I was bracing myself.

------
redridingnews
Why can't I read this on my iPhone? For some reason, it asks me to log in.

------
xster
Google groups lies! The author was Al Gore!

