

This is experimental. However, it could start a revolution in information access - fogus
http://i.imgur.com/nkBnu.png

======
junkbit
August 1991: WWW goes live; Linux Kernel announced; USSR collapsed; SNES
English release; Terminator 2 was in the cinemas and Smells Like Teen Spirit
had its radio début. What a month

~~~
bobf
What a month indeed! The first two are really only interesting to the masses
in hindsight though. I wonder how many interesting technological advances
happen every month that we don't realize until years later.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Robert Goddard's initial liquid fueled rocketry projects received generally
negative publicity (a well-known NY Times editorial denounced the very idea
that a rocket could operate outside the Earth's atmosphere, for example).

The transistor initially received very minor media coverage.

For years the laser was derided as a solution looking for a problem.

------
Splines
I don't know if it's just me, but the link appears to be broken.

> We're sorry, but we were unable to find the topic you were looking for.
> Perhaps the URL you clicked on is out of date or broken?

~~~
BobbyH
Here is the text of the link:

Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.announce Followup-To: poster From:
ti...@nxoc01.cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee) Date: 20 Aug 91 01:54:41 GMT Local:
Mon, Aug 19 1991 9:54 pm Subject: WorldWideWeb wide-area hypertext app
available

The WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release in source
and binary form from info.cern.ch.

WorldWideWeb is a hypertext browser/editor which allows one to read
information from local files and remote servers. It allows hypertext links to
be made and traversed, and also remote indexes to be interrogated for lists of
useful documents. Local files may be edited, and links made from areas of text
to other files, remote files, remote indexes, remote index searches, internet
news groups and articles. All these sources of information are presented in a
consistent way to the reader. For example, an index search returns a hypertext
document with pointers to documents matching the query. Internet news articles
are displayed with hypertext links to other referenced articles and groups.

The code is not strictly public domain: it is copyright CERN (see copyright
notice is in the .tar), but is free to collaborating institutes.

Also available is a portable line mode browser which allows hypertext to be
browsed by anyone with a dumb ascii terminal emulator. Hypertext may be made
public by putting on an anonymous FTP server, or by using a HTTP daemon. A
skeleton HTTP daemon is also available in source form. A server may be written
to make other existing data readable by WWW browsers. Files are

    
    
        /pub/WWWNeXTStepEditor_0.12.tar.Z    NeXT application + sources
        /pub/WWWLineMode_0.11.tar.Z          Portable Line Mode Browser
        /pub/WWWDaemon_0.1.tar.Z             Simple server
    

Basic documentation is enclosed. Details about our project and about hypertext
in general are available in hypertext form on our servers, as are lists of
known bugs and features.

This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty
whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access. We are
currently using WWW for user support at CERN. We would be very interested in
comments from anyone trying WWW, and especially those making other data
available, as part of a truly world-wide web.

Tim BL
___________________________________________________________________________
Tim Berners-Lee ti...@info.cern.ch World Wide Web project Tel: +41(22)767 3755
CERN Fax: +41(22)767 7155 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland

~~~
user24
Where did you get that from? The link worked for me this morning but now
doesn't, which makes me worry that google have killed the posting for some
reason!?

~~~
wccrawford
It worked for me just now.

~~~
user24
it's been changed from the "original" google groups link to an imgur link.

Groups link was:
[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.announce/browse...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.announce/browse_thread/thread/6af5808c84a771fc/42c02b1b5992dd3)

edit: and from the monthly archive for Aug 1991 it looks like the TBL message
dated 20 Aug 1991 has just... gone!

[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.announce/browse...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.announce/browse_frm/month/1991-08)

------
mambodog
If anyone wants to take it for a spin:
[http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/App...](http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/Apps/Internet/WWW/Web%20Browsers/First_Web_Browser/)

Note: NEXTSTEP required. Runs pretty well in VMWare.

EDIT: If you're running a VM you'll want the "33fat" (fat binary) one.

Also here is the Obj-C source code: <http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-
NeXT/Implementation/>

~~~
nixy
So the first version of WWW was implemented in Obj-C?

~~~
kunley
WorldWideWeb, the browser running on NeXTSTEP, was written in Objective C as
most of GUI stuff on this platform.

------
ericb
> However, it could start a revolution in information access.

He has a gift for statement (not over or under).

~~~
eru
I'm whelmed.

~~~
presidentender
I'm fairly plussed.

------
tobtoh
Reading this announcement is like being able to see the first drop of water
that starts off the Amazon river. Something so 'normal' to start with and yet
ends up awe-inspiring by the end.

~~~
bconway
And yet, that damn fax machine is still just as alive and kicking today as it
was in 1991.

~~~
dasil003
Well not quite. Now you can laugh in people's face when they ask you to fax
something and they will look sheepish rather than glaring at you.

~~~
ultrasaurus
And when they fax you back it'll be at an online service that mails you a PDF.
And they're none the wiser.

~~~
Dylanlacey
F.....aaax? _Dull look_

------
davidmathers
I remember well what happened when I first saw this: I tried running the text
browser via my telnet session, thought "this sucks", and went back to using
gopher.

Then at some point Wired magazine removed their archives from gopher and put
them on WWW. At first I was like "fuck you Wired" but then I was like
"actually this WWW thing isn't so bad after all."

~~~
three14
I had the same reaction, until I finally saw a web page with _images_ in
Mosaic on an SGI.

------
elliottcarlson
Nice to see this announcement... Makes me remember what I was doing back in
those days - and makes me wonder what other HN'ers were doing back then.

I was 12, playing on BBS' and attempting to teach myself Turbo Pascal so I
could possibly write IGM's for Legend of the Red Dragon...

~~~
noonespecial
I was 15. I was trying to run a small bbs on my Commodore Amiga. We were
learning Turbo Pascal and wondering if this new "object oriented" approach to
programming was going to catch on. (I think TP5 was the first realeas to
include oo extensions.)

The wall fell. I was in Germany. It was nuts.

~~~
elliottcarlson
It wasn't until a good couple of years later that I ran my own BBS - I was
running Iniquity and remember the hours upon hours spent on creating ASCII art
for all the screens. That and the fact that I ran the BBS on my only phone
line, meaning it was a 11pm to 6am only BBS - good times.

------
natch
Why would anyone need this when they have Gopher?

------
subbu
Hypertext?? A bunch of special characters around text? Nah. Its too simple.

------
roadnottaken
Link broken ?

~~~
mambodog
Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rLTkCRa...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rLTkCRaHIM4J:groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.announce/msg/042c02b1b5992dd3)

Screencap: <http://i.imgur.com/nkBnu.png>

------
crocowhile
And this is way doing research for living means having the best job in the
world. Most likely you are not going to be rich by any mean, but once in a
while what you do will change the world.

------
DanI-S
Meh, it'll never catch on.

~~~
jfb
ACTUAL JFB QUOTE FROM SEEING AN EARLY (LATE 91?) DEMO:

This sucks. Why would _anybody_ switch from Gopher?

~~~
brlewis
I think it was 1992 that TBL was going around selling the WWW to different
organizations. That's the year I worked on MIT's TechInfo, similar to gopher.
TechInfo had great tools for information providers, but it was still an uphill
battle getting departments to keep their info up-to-date. Since the WWW
required a lot more knowledge and effort, it seemed hopeless to think you
could ever base a campus-wide information system on it.

I didn't see TBL's pitch myself at that time, but the senior people on the
project did, and they showed me the lame terminal browser. NeXT was the only
graphical browser available. I agreed with them that hypertext was too
unstructured. Give it to regular people and you'd have chaos.

When Mosaic introduced the IMG tag and people could actually embed images in
hypertext, that's when the demos started to get impressive and the web took
off.

------
junkbit
Hmm read/write web browser/editor? So Web 0.1 was Web 2.0

~~~
user24
yes, it really was! TBL's been trying to 'put the lid back on' and get the web
closer to his original vision ever since!

------
27182818284
Google's 20 year archive has a lot of fun little posts like this.

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

------
andreyf
Interesting, I never realized this connection:

 _A NeXT Computer was used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN to develop the world's
first web server software, CERN HTTPd, and also used to write the first web
browser, WorldWideWeb. This workstation became the world's first web server on
the Internet._

Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer>

~~~
zandorg
So as NeXT founder, Steve Jobs was indirectly responsible for HTML? Of course,
Marc Andreessen was responsible for images and also porting the NeXT code to
Windows/MacOS.

------
jcfrei
What I still dont get: was this server accessible from anywhere, or just from
within the local cern network? when were the root nameservers put into
service, so you could access any server via an URL? I'm guessing the
infrastructure for the internet was already in place - what Tim Berners-Lee
established was a new protocol that enabled the simple exchange of documents
between remote computers... Am I getting this right?

~~~
brlewis
It was accessible throughout the Internet. If you knew the http protocol you
could telnet to port 80 and get pages (still works today).

------
Kilimanjaro
I wonder why the didn't pick web. instead of www.

Not the best alternative for sure but at least a thousand times easier to
pronounce.

~~~
jamespitts
While it was wordy, the use of www and "world wide web" added a certain
cuteness and folksiness to the technology. This, along with the very
simplicity of setting up a web page, helped fuel its adoption. WWW indicated
that the technology was about community and universal access, and early art
appearing on the web fed into this. The smiling-fat-spider-on-a-web and the
Earth-meshed-with-circuits may have not seemed so inviting if it were just a
web and not The World Wide Web!

Plus it sure was enjoyable to watch people on television stumble through
double-U double-U double-U dot...

~~~
mikeklaas
To this day I can't figure out why people don't say "triple double-u". It's so
much shorter, but more importantly, flows great.

~~~
toolate
Dub-dub-dub.

------
Archaeum
The announcement includes a notice akin to a primitive open source license:

    
    
      The code is not strictly public domain: it is copyright
      CERN (see copyright notice is in the .tar), but is free
      to collaborating institutes.
    

Was it typical back then to release code while retaining the copyright as
opposed to making it public domain?

------
mitchellhislop
I was about to turn 3. I am sure that I was geeky, and trying to program my
high-chair, but never the less, still just learning the world.

I do wish that I would have been more in the 10-11 year old range. So much
excellent stuff happened that year - just a few months after that, the
Minnesota Twins won the series.

~~~
zecho
In the most dramatic Fall Classic of all time.

------
chmike
A colleague, who was present when Tim presented the WWW at a CERN seminar in
its early days, reported to me that one person in the assistance asked at the
end of the presentation what was the use for this software (quelle est
l'utilité de ce logiciel).

------
storborg
This is purely intellectual curiosity, but does anyone have those tarballs?

