The Web from 1989 to 1994 | Hacker News Reader

The Web from 1989 to 1994

thehistoryoftheweb.com

110 pointskamphey22 comments

Wow! Cool. If I remember correctly, Internet services was launched in India on Aug 15, 1995 (Independence Day). While still in college, I waited to "read" about it in magazines (which I had to specifically ask/order the book shop) that comes a month late to my home town.

For the next few years, I learnt and even did HTML page designs by reading from these magazines. The day I landed in a bigger city (Bombay), the first thing I did was visit an Internet café and created my Hotmail (I still own it to this day) and a Yahoo account. I felt happy, relaxed and visited the beach (my next biggest priority) in the evening.

I had a mentor-ish kinda "uncle" whom most other people treated as semi-crazy. But he was the one whom I debated endless hours on how and why the Internet without even experiencing it way back in the early 90s. Now, I understand many things he said, the most interesting one being that the Internet will allow anyone to do anything from anywhere and that's gonna change everything.

So wait, Pakistan actually had the Internet before India? (The Brain folks in Lahore, etc). Wikipedia says first public availability was 1994.

"the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), later renamed to the Uniform Resource Locator (URL)"

Nice resource, but I thought a URL is one form of URI, another being a URN.

It depends on who you ask.

According to the W3C, it used to be that:

> a URI was either a URL or a URN.

But now, it’s complicated:

> the view became that an individual scheme does not need to be cast into one of a discrete set of URI types such as "URL", "URN" […]

> Further according to the contemporary view, the term "URL" does not refer to a formal partition of URI space; rather, URL is a useful but informal concept […]

> Thus as we noted, "http:" is a URI scheme. An http URI is a URL.

All the above citations from https://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/

The WHATWG holds a different view:

> Standardize on the term URL. URI and IRI are just confusing. […] URL also easily wins the search result popularity contest.

From https://url.spec.whatwg.org/

This may be what the author of the article had in mind.

In my (humble) opinion only URL makes much sense in the context of the web, since URI could be almost anything addressing something (in the internet or not).

Early years was really fun esp the mixing between internet and the BBS (that were way cheaper to use) eg: Internet outdials via BBSs, ftp/web by email (on the BBS again).

Early subscriptions -friggin expensive in comparison to what you are getting now (speed+d/l limits) they were mainly dialups to a (restricted) shell (SunOS most of them).

> Early subscriptions -friggin expensive in comparison to what you are getting now (speed+d/l limits) they were mainly dialups to a (restricted) shell (SunOS most of them).

And now we're back to using cloud accounts with 'friggin expensive' egress bandwidth for most of our non-trivial Internet needs. (The underlying cause is of course different - a combination of IPv4 address exhaustion and the increased prevalence of ephemeral mobile connections that are not reachable via a single network address. But it's remarkable nonetheless.)

Early on, e.g. 1980s, the Internet and BBS worlds were pretty siloed. But at some point in the 90s, for a lot of people, the more commercial BBSs became ISPs. Probably until I eventually got broadband around 2000 or so, my ISP was the BBS I subscribed to in Cambridge MA for many years.

Bookmarked as a resource.

It would be interesting to catalog info on primordial pre-web internet navigation tech: Gopher, WAIS, etc. Also "the competition", e.g. AOL succumbing to the WWW. Might be fun to have some stuff like Wired Magazine declaring the WWW to be "tired" in 1994 too. It wasn't inevitable.

I have the O'Reilly Whole Internet book from the mid-90s. It has chapters on all the various Internet services and also has a short one on this new-fangled hypertext thing out of CERN called the World Wide Web.

You can also sign up for my newsletter, where I regularly sound out stories about web history and new additions to the (still growing) timeline! https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/

Please consider removing "font-size: 14px" from the CSS rule for the main text of the page.

There is also a typo for January 26, 1994: "verison"

I feel that it should have Feb. 2, 2000 - CERT publishes the first advisory about cross-site scripting https://web.archive.org/web/20000302105858/http://www.cert.o... (on the https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/timeline/?date_from=1997&date... page, of course)

Really good timeline presentation. I think that Napster/peer-to-peer circa 1995 deserves to be added.

Napster was in 1999.

Just mentioning ewtoo talkers for the hell of it ... Surfers in particular if anyone is still around.

They had the raw bones of Whatssap down 25 years ago

Was my on-ramp for using the web for social purposes as loads of Uni peeps were on it. It was great.

I would've expected TUCOWS or Trumpet Windsock to be mentioned. I think those were so instrumental in expanding internet usage and usability to home Windows users.

That time Hacker News did a fundraiser for the Trumpet Winsock developer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875

Needs more CU-SeeMe

I tried that a few times with a black and white Connectix Quickcam. :-)

There’s a great podcast called Web Masters that actually interviews a lot of the people mentioned in this.

Off the top of my head, I’ve heard episodes with the creators of GeoCities, Links From the Underground, and Usenet just to name a few.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/web-masters/id15300777...

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