#TodayInHistory 1995 – WikiWikiWeb, the world's first #wiki and part of the Portland Pattern Repository, is made public by Ward Cunningham.

"Wiki" is a Hawaiian language word for "quick". Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, so he initially thought about calling it "QuickWeb", but later changed his mind and dubbed it "WikiWikiWeb".

#worldwideweb

Pictured Ward Cunningham

back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

. Welcome to the Internet
Have a look around.

Yes, back before search engines, truly took off, there was indeed a "Yellow Pages" (phone book) for the Internet.

#Internet #WorldWideWeb #Welcome

On 12 March it was the anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee.

Did you know that Tim Berners-Lee is an English computer scientist and that the internet (as we know it) was created in Geneva, Switzerland?

He also created the HTML language, the URL system and the HTTP protocol.

So, when you type a website address (URL) into your address bar in your browser like this:

http://www

you're actually using Sir Tim's work.

Curiously, he later regretted using the initial pair of slashes '//' on the address though - it was a design choice hated by a lot people. (Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8306631.stm)
#worldwideweb #internet #technology #european

Has the World Wide Web turned the world better or worse?

»Internetmeilenstein–Erste .com-Domain feiert 40. Geburtstag:
Vor 40 Jahren wurde die erste .com-Domain registriert - ein Meilenstein der Internetgeschichte. Symbolics.com markierte den Beginn der kommerziellen Nutzung des Internets, sechs Jahre vor dem Start des World Wide Web«

Ja, ja das Internet ist älter als viele es wahrhaben (wollen?). Auch für mich ist es jünger im Kopf als die Wahrheit ;)

https://winfuture.de/news/149608

»#GeoCities, known throughout most of 1995 as #BeverlyHillsInternet, was one of the first commercial internet services to make it easy for people to #publish a #homepage on the #WorldWideWeb.« https://cybercultural.com/p/geocities-1995/?eicker.news #tech #media

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉 𝑶𝒇 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑾𝒆𝒃

https://garry.net/posts/the-death-of-the-web

On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss at CERN. “Vague but exciting” was his feedback. The project later became the World Wide Web.

Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, for changing the world!

The 2nd original mistake regarding the #WorldWideWeb was the choice to give the web page/site author control over how the page would be rendered by de browser

It should've been left to the browser developers, letting browsers compete on their default uniform look and feel for the whole web

Likely eventually leading to installable look and feel packages designed by expert designers and enthusiasts which you can load into the browser like extensions.

—
#ReImaginingTheWeb #UnpopularOpinion

"The web is a movement: more than a set of protocols, languages, and software, it was always about bringing about a social and cultural shift that removed traditional gatekeepers to publishing and being heard."

https://werd.io/2025/the-web-was-always-about-redistribution-of-power-lets-bring

@ben

RE: https://werd.social/@ben/114093445865036728

nothing felt more exotic than seeing ozemail.com.au domains join my irc channels in 1995

diskette image:
https://archive.org/details/15-ozemail-internet-starter-kit-v-2-orig

The early Web —

There was a social-norm among some of the people on the early Web, that you (the creator of web-site or web-page) should never set the text-color or background-color of a web-page.

That the user should decide what text-color and background-color web-pages are displayed in in their web-browsers.

That gave the early web a distinctive look (due to the default text-color and background-color) — black text on a grey background.

#000000 #F0F0F0 #Netscape #WorldWideWeb

From the year 2001:

I remember when web-sites like this were considered very, very, sleek, new, and fancy.

And, compared to what web-sites tended to look like in the 1990s, they were!

@cybercultural @ricmac

RE: https://indieweb.social/@cybercultural/113989953061003587

The Web has been voluntarily opt-out since the early to mid- 1990s.

Before that, there was no opt-ing out.

The act of putting something onto the (open) Web was (and still is) understood as consent for others to use your data.

This is the norm of the Web — and has been for decades.

I think it is unlikely this norm is going to change any time soon.

I love that @distrowatch looks almost exactly the same as it did 20+ years ago. Mandrake was the number 1 #linux distro (in page ranking)!

https://web.archive.org/web/20040126133455/http://www.distrowatch.com/