Did you know? 🎙️🦤 The second web browser in history, and apparently the first one designed to be multiplatform, was coded by Nicola Pellow – a crucial step in making the web accessible to a wider audience at the time, and having a lasting impact on the development of the https://nowebwithoutwomen.com/tory #powercodershttps://nowebwithoutwomen.com/
Back in 1996, Netscape announced the imminent launch of Webstories, a column showcasing the best in Web development. Over the next two years, they kept pushing the launch date back and back before quietly forgetting the whole thing.
With the help of the Wayback Machine, let's take a look at this never-launched column, and learn a little about late 90s Web culture and technology along the way: https://danq.me/netscapes-untold-webstories
Happy 31st Anniversary of the First Public Release of NCSA X/Mosaic (v0.5).
Sadly, I could not find an actual screenshot of v0.5, so this one of v1.2 from wikipedia will have to do.
I worked on X/Mosaic (v2.6+) at NCSA SDG as a "student programmer" back in '95-'96, after the Netscape Exodus but while Mosaic was still under active development. It was a good learning experience and a way to earn $10/hr in an on-campus job as a Computer Engineering undergrad.
"does anyone else remember Matmice, a web host for kids and teens from the 00s? If so, do you remember the novel/story sites where people posted fiction they wrote?....
When I found out Matmice was shutting down sometime in ... 2008... I opened up Microsoft Works and backed up copies of every single one I was aware of.... I saved over 200 different stories...."
If you wrote one of these, get in touch with the archivist (who isn't me)!
Whenever someone asks me about my time at Facebook, I like to share this pair of photos. One from when I started, and the other from when I left about 6 years later.
It's funny, when the web and personal computers first got started, recipes were often cited as the 'killer app' hauled out whenever an enthusiast wanted to explain why regular people would want a machine in their home, or why they'd use the 'net.
Now some 30yrs later, it seems like recipe sites are the harbingers of everything wrong with the web. So many of them are now mostly SEO-laden link-farms, and ad-revenue trash.
Just ran across this AWESOME website that has a great guide to the history of the web from 1989 to 2020! It's a great looking site that has all kinds of interesting blurbs about important historical dates in the Internet's history.
(There's a form to enter your email on the front of the site if you want email updates etc, but I'm skipping straight to the timeline with this link here):
I don't understand folks who say that the #internet and the open #web were a mistake. They have done exactly what they were meant to do: to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world, in order to accelerate knowledge discovery and innovation (which we see today; I can barely keep up with the papers being published). It just needs continuous improvement via open standards and development. #webhistory
Welcome to my Friday cabinet of curiosities, a roundup of stuff I enjoyed this week! Today’s links include the world’s last internet cafes, a secret train ride, and yes, Barbie and Oppenheimer (—but not Barbenheimer) 🖥️🚆👠
The world’s first internet cafe opened in London, England in 1994. Nearly 30 years later, Rest of World visits the few that remain and explores the history of web connectivity in Uganda, Nepal, Nigeria, Argentina, Mexico, and Hong Kong
The Github project also has directions on building on Arch and Ubuntu.
Unfortunately, modern TLS and SNI aren't supported, so #Mosaic can't connect to a lot of websites, but it's still a fun look back at a piece of #WebHistory !
I know it's going around, but one of my big new hobbies is just randomly clicking on my bookmark for https://wiby.me/surprise, which sends you to a random web 1.0 website.
It's fascinating. Websites pop up like this screengrab that's attached, a guy made a website and put a list of comic book characters in songs he documented on it.
Really weird stuff, too.
Old personal websites GALORE. Try it out - but beware, it's addictive. 😂
@maikel This is not just how it should be, but how it was when I first used the internet (in pre-web days!)
1991: Tim Berners-Lee of CERN launches the web (intended for scientific information exchange)
1991: The American NSF permits commercial use of the internet for the first time
1994: Early web search engines are launched (WebCrawler and Lycos, followed soon after by the likes of AltaVista and Yahoo!)
(Before this, and for some time after, hand-crafted web directories helped people find what they were looking for: I was a maintainer of part of the WWW Virtual Library)
1995: Amazon launches its online bookstore (promoted mainly through articles in print media!)
1998: Google (‘Don’t be evil’) launches its search engine
2000: Google starts selling text ads – and starts being a little bit evil 👿