

Ask HN: What was the first URL you saw in the wild? - replicatorblog

With the WWW recently celebrating it's 20th anniversary I was thinking back to the first time I saw a URL on a commercial, advertisement, etc. It was definitely a McDonald's TV commercial probably around 1996. Do you remember your first URL?
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triplefox
I vaguely remember using some university's gopher system at a demonstration
Internet setup circa 1992-93. That would make me seven or eight years old.

The first url I actually remember would probably be liii.com:8000 as that was
the host of a Merc MUD I played on(Barren Realms). I have some recollection of
playing on it a few times before we got internet access at home. Now they're
at <http://www.barrenrealmsmud.com/> and I haven't visited in probably a
decade now. Nice that they're still around.

The second early url I remember is crl.com, the dial-up ISP my dad signed up
with. We had a shell account on a real Unix box, with a whopping 5mb storage,
and we weren't allowed to run SLiRP/TIA so we couldn't emulate a SLIP/PPP
connection and use graphical browsers(a sore spot as the Web got increasingly
graphical). They moved to business-only services some years later (and we
moved on to other ISPs) Now the domain appears to be taken by a drug company.
I don't remember what crl stood for, even.

A third good one was ftp.wuarchive.wustl.edu. They had a pretty spiffy
anonymous ftp in the early 90s. Apparently it is now "too expensive to push
bits to the world."

My predominant memory of the internet before around 1996 was that the Web was
only one of several viable systems: email, Usenet, telnet, and ftp were also
used by my 8-to-10-year-old self. But as I got older, the Web rapidly took
over everything. I was still using dial-up right up until 2003 when I went off
to college. And then still used dial-up when home on breaks, until I got a
laptop and stole the neighbor's wi-fi. It's funny to think of how much dial-
up's user experience grew less tolerable over time.

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kyro
It was nickelodeon.com on a commercial at the age of 10 or so. And it was
pretty damn amazing, strange, and breathtaking even, the first time I booted
up AOL dial-up and loaded the page.

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thwarted
It wasn't the first, but one I remember shown in the trailer for the movie The
Craft (I have no idea what movie I actually went to the theater to see). It is
memorable because someone yelled out in the theater "HOLD ON WHILE I GET A PEN
TO WRITE THAT DOWN", and the theater broke out in laughter. Little did they
know that this little WWW thing wasn't just a flash in the pan.

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babyshake
I don't really recall the first URL, but I have a very clear memory of the
first time I saw broadband access. My dad's friend gave us a demo of how you
could load yahoo.com in "only seconds" with his cable connection. Within a
week, we had our subscription.

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lionheart
<http://www.yahooligans.com> I used to love that site when I was a kid.

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paraschopra
Yahoo.com at a computer being displayed at a tradeshow. I was mesmerised at
that point...

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nostrademons
gopher:some.obscure.university.address.edu. It was late 1993.

~~~
gne1963
where did you see that in the wild?

~~~
nostrademons
I was basically a "problem child" in middle school - I kinda refused to do
anything I didn't want to. So after I'd flunked the kitchen safety test in
home ec for the 5th time (true/false test and I scored a zero for the last 3
times :-)), school administration basically said "There's this new thing
called the 'Internet' that we just got access to. We've got a dialup modem in
the computer lab; why don't you spend the 42 minutes there instead of wasting
your time pissing off the home ec teacher?" and then handed me a bunch of
things I might want to try typing in - mostly gopher links, though there was
this new invention called the "World Wide Web" that they suggested I check out
too. I thought it was horribly disorganized and spent most of my time with
Gopher.

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nreece
The local ISP's website, and Altavista I guess.

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Shooter
symbolics.com

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gne1963
www.cnn.com

