The WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release (1991) | Hacker News Reader

The WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release (1991)

groups.google.com

438 pointsimplmentor125 comments

"This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access."

Up there with "one small step...", imo.

Far beyond, in fact. The moon landing, though cool and awesome, really didn't lead to much in the way of technological advancement or societal change. certainly not as much as the web, at any rate.

That took me aback as well.

In. Deed.

I just love how I came across this manifesto http://www.pastebin.com/0xXV8k7k just after the WWW alpha post. (hn link: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3624866)

Yeah, this should be on a memorial somewhere. Or at least in one of those "pretty silly in hindsight" quote books.

Who would have thought that such a short time later it would be the revolution in information access that we take for granted, and the lack of warranty bit that'd we'd be fighting to uphold.

Fighting to uphold the lack of warranty? What?

Censorship/SOPA reference. Warranty in the sense that they mean recourse if you're disappointed with the product, or it doesn't perform as advertised. Obviously, TBL was commenting on code quality.. but in general it made me think about how much jeopardy the spirt of freedom that use-at-your-own-risk tends to come with, is in lately.

To give a taste of how quickly this exploded. This is 1991. By 1995 I was working at a small ISP. The ISP existed only because there was demand to get on the web. I started my masters in 1996 but was then lured away by a job at Cox Interactice Media, a several hundred person division that Cox Enterprises setup just so it could have a web presence. That's just 5 years after this annoucement, and well, we know where it went from there. All for something that didnt exist when I graduated highschool.

Try to imagine inventing somthing with that kind of impact that quickly.

Heh, Cox.

In all seriousness though I can only dimly remember a time without the Internet in my house it's changed so much in so little time it's crazy.

Interesting. What part of Cox's web division in particular? I'm actually working for a small group of newspapers that were spun off of Cox about 3 years ago.

Cox Interactive Media. The division doesn't exist anymore. At the time it ran the web sites for the media properties (newspapers, TVs, radio stations). http://web.archive.org/web/19991013054542/http://cimedia.com...

Other things that grew more quickly did so afterward, using the web in order to achieve that growth. Each one seems to grow more quickly than the last.

Sure, and the web couldn't have existed w/o the Internet before it, which took many years to get to where it was in 1991. But it is definitely the Internet's killer app.

The rise of the Internet itself was an interesting phenomenon. There were a number of larger networks in place, but the Internet was used by the 'cool kids' (e.g. students and professors).

I was writing for NeXTWorld magazine at the time I saw TimBL's newsgroup announcement.

I mentioned it to a colleague at the magazine, John Perry Barlow, who emailed his friend Mitch Kapor at EFF, saying "[Kehoe] passed on the following about something called World Wide Web, which sounds rather like Project Xanadu emerging from the Matrix almost without design. This could be cool." Here's the original email (screen grab from my NeXT machine): http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/images/barlow.gif

I emailed TimBL and told him I'd asked my editors to let my co-editor and I write about it. TimBL was enthusiastic but warned me, "We have to avoid any embarrassment about CERN code being 'given away for free' when developed with European taxpayers' money. We are working on this but don't say anything in print about how one gets hold of the code without checking for latest developments first!" Here's the original email from TimBL: http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/images/timbl.gif

TimBL had no reason for concern -- my editors decided the story was not newsworthy and we never ran the piece.

I was working on a book proposal at the time, titled "Plugging Into the Planet," which introduced the Internet and explained how computer users could get connected to Usenet, Gopher, and WAIS. I added a section on the WWW. Random House, Bantam, and other major publishers turned it down. I was told books about modems didn't sell well.

When I saw TimBL's announcement, I felt it was an important project and worthy of notice. Still, I thought that calling it the WorldWideWeb was vainglorious; after all, how worldwide was it really, running on the handful of NeXTs that had Internet connections? It wasn't until John Markoff's December 1993 article in the New York Times describing NCSA Mosaic for Windows that popular interest in the web burgeoned. Even then, there were very few ISPs, modems were slow, and there was no easy way to create and serve web pages. That we now have the web is a testament to both the power of TimBL's vision and the enthusiasm of everyone who encountered it.

Its a bit off topic, but I am curious about a bit of slang used. John Perry said "... sounds rather like Project Xanadu emerging from the Matrix ... ".

I'm familiar with project Xanadu and for a moment I just presumed "the matrix" was a reference to the movie. But then I realized the e-mail was sent in 1991 ...

What did he mean by "the matrix"?

I love John Perry Barlow's use of language. As you guessed, he was referring to Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu hypertext project. "The Matrix" was a term used by researcher John Quarterman (and the title of Quarterman's seminal book) to designate the totality of all the world's computer networks, which in 1991 were not all linked together (FidoNet, the Internet, DECnet, others long forgotten). As far as I know, Quarterman appropriated the term from William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, where "the Matrix" was the global computer network that was the locus of cyberspace. I think Barlow, in his visionary way, was referencing Neuromancer. The Wachowski brothers' borrowing of the term "the Matrix" for their 1999 film corrupted a term that had meaning in the early 1990s. Now, shall we say, it is deprecated.

"how worldwide was it really, running on the handful of NeXTs that had Internet connections? "

Especially when some of those Internet connections were UUCP.

There was a turning point for me, somewhere between the purchase of a 33.6 modem and upgrade from 30 monthly hours to unlimited dial-up, when the Web changed from a curiosity to the best thing ever.

The meme back then was that you could go to the Louvre from your home computer. But before those two upgrades it felt like it would be faster and cheeper to just take a plane. I had much more fun with CD-ROMs from computer magazines.

The other essential turning point was the discovery that the phone company would only charge you a single pulse from midnight to 6 am. So at 12:01, the horde of nerds would dispute the few available lines of the ISPs to try to get connected. No taximeter, no Moms inadvertently grabbing the phone and disconnecting you. That kind of shaped a whole generation's habits and schedules.

At about the same time there was also a change of culture. I remember having to call people to tell them I sent an email a few days ago. When people began answering me the same day, things started to get interesting. And then there was SPAM and we lost that forever :)

Or least until Gmail came along and rescued us with its magical bayesian filter and petabytes of data.

>"There was a turning point for me, somewhere between the purchase of a 33.6 modem and upgrade from 30 monthly hours to unlimited dial-up, when the Web changed from a curiosity to the best thing ever."

My experience mirrors yours! I paid $279.99 for a 28.8 modem, somewhere around 1995. At that point my internet service went through a local BBS that was charging a rate of $2.00/hour, unless you bought a package of 100 hours, in which case it was $1.00. I remember installing Netscape off two floppies. That was also the time I discovered MUDs. How I did't bankrupt my parents is beyond me. When ICAN.net (later Primus) came to Canada with an unlimited internet plan for $30 bucks, minds were blown.

The internet is the technology that fundamentally transformed my life. Love seeing these articles, thanks for the nostalgia.

re: grabbing the phone and disconnecting.

I remember that like it was yesterday. God, it was so painful to be in the middle of a download--even just a web page--and have someone pick up the phone. Aaaargh! Then you do the modem 2-step, wait for the lo-fi screaming ghost, and back on the web you would go.

People born today will ask, "You had to connect through your phone? And the phone was connected to the wall?"

Oh do you remember the internet at this speed? Up all night and you'd see eight women."

-- from The IT Crowd

And on a somewhat related note: not being able to get any phone calls while connected to the internet either.

Onetime I got the busy signal for 3 hours straight before walking 10 miles home because my mom was waiting for my call while on the internet.

Google demands a login to allow me to read the article on my iPhone.

Not the WWW that Tim imagined.

This is because you have an expired google login cookie. It's annoying and is not specific to iOS. Delete that cookie and you can read w/o logging in. On the desktop, I almost always use a Chrome incognito window for Google Groups.

It also doesn't let you read it if you block cookies. I use Chromium for Google stuff and Nightly with ghostery/noscript for everything else.

Didn't work. Deleted Cookies, Cache and databases.

It still knows who I am and asks for password.

"We also released an iPhone version of the WorldWideWeb Application. Unfortunately, we were turned down by Apple for acceptance into the iTunes store."

Careful there. Had Apple bought WWW (It was a NeXT-only application anyway) we would have had a lot more justin biebers.

Initially Tim Berners-Lee wanted to call it 'The Information Mine' - abbreviated to 'TIM'

That sounds like Google's mission. "The information. Mine."

Here's my personal story:

I distinctly remember a professor showing me a web browser (not Gopher!) before I left for a second-semester and summer co-op, my Sophomore year in college (starting around January/February, and running until August). I graduated High School in May of 1991, so then I was a Freshman in college in August of 1991 (right around when this was posted.) I was a Sophomore in August of 1992, and it would have been right around December of 1992 when I saw the browser, if my memory is correct.

I've been trying to figure out if my memory is flawed... And if not, what browser he would have been using.

It couldn't have been NCSA Mosaic, because 0.1a wasn't out until June 1993:

ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Windows/Archive/MosaicHistory.html

Or Netscape Navigator, because 0.9 wasn't out until 1994.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#Release_hist...

So, December of 1992, probably not a NeXT (I don't think), certainly an X-Windows system. Probably a Sun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

That leaves Erwise, ViolaWWW...

Or maybe my memory is flawed. Maybe I didn't see the graphical WWW browser until after I got back from my co-op, so some time around August of 1993. :(

If I remembered the professor's name, I could email him and ask!

I wonder how many people saw the WWW before me? If you look at how long people have been web browsing, what percentile am I in? 99.9%? 99.99%? 99.999%? How many nines, damnit! :)

Maybe it was a NeXT. I know my school later had NeXT boxes. That would certainly make my remembered timeline more plausible...

My boss wrote MidasWWW, a Motif/X based browser for Unix. It was out in November 1992.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidasWWW http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser

> Where does Mosaic fit in? > A: As I understand it, Marc Andreessen at NCSA was shown ViolaWWW by a colleague (David Thompson?) at NCSA. Marc downloaded Midas and tried it out. He and Eric Bina then wrote their own browser for unix from scratch. Later, several other folks at NCSA joined the team to port the idea to Mac and PC. As they did, Tom Bruce at Cornell was writing "Cello" for the PC which came out neck-and-neck with Mosaic on the PC.

'also remote indexes to be interrogated for lists of useful documents'

Now I know why the home page of most web sites is named index.html

what are you doing? nothing, just creating http, html and a browser and client. that's what i call a "getting things done" attitude.

Newton: can't describe physics effectively, invents calculus.

Berners-Lee: can't collaborate effectively with physicists, invents the web.

Interesting to note that he has a degree in Physics himself, and the idea was for physicists to collaborate with each other.

wait, can anyone please tell me the story behind this post? i understand it is about some primitive text browser for web but why (and how) is it on google groups? google wasn't even there at that time. and how can one add a post and date it in the past?

Back in 2001, Google bought the DejaNews archives which contained old Usenet posts and imported them into Google Groups (using the original dates).

This was the start of the web. Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web system of hyper-linked pages of information. He then wrote the first tools to help browse this collection of pages. This newsgroup post is the original announcement for the tools he had developed. Google Groups include archives of old newsgroup postings and this story is linking to the original announcement in 1991. See Wikipedia page on History of the WWW for more info. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

Its a Usenet post from 1991. In 2001 Google bought [1] the usenet archive built by Deja.com, which included that post, and added the archive's contents to Google groups to enable searching Usenet using Google.

[1] http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease48.html

primitive text browser for web

Browser, server and editor. His original view was that everyone would publish from their own machines in a P2P way.

That `editor' part cannot be stressed enough. It's a shame the PUT and PATCH HTTP methods aren't widely used nor open for use.

I haven't seen a PATCH used in any real fashion, but PUT is now a fairly standard part of most HTTP APIs.

> but PUT is now a fairly standard part of most HTTP APIs.

Is it? I know Rails uses "put" for editing a model, but it was my understanding that it simulates this via a hidden field in the form and actually issuing a POST request.

Why does it behave that way? I thought it was because many browsers don't support PUT, but maybe it's for other reasons?

I'm referring to an HTTP API (RESTful if you will). HTML forms only support GET and POST, but browsers support GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE via XMLHttpRequest.

Also, access to a lot of services' APIs don't come from browsers at all.

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize it was only HTML forms limited to GET and POST and not the browser as a whole.

PUT is not supported in the browser [1], but web APIs are mainly intended for non-browser clients to access. A client app that consumes a well-designed HTTP web API will use POST to create a resource, PUT to update a resource, and so on.

[1] With the caveat that the Javascript XMLHttpRequest API does support PUT and DELETE.

I don't understand this distinction. A client is a client; how are you to distinguish "browsers" from other clients?

The GP here was poorly worded. It's not that browsers don't support PUT and DELETE (they do, and it's used all the time vie XMLHttpRequest), it's that HTML doesn't support those verbs for forms.

You're right in that a "client is a client", and the API doesn't (or shouldn't) care.

Some intrepid blogger ought to do a round-up of all the seminal Usenet posts like this. Thinking of Linus announcing Linux, Larry announcing his pagerank/webcrawler, etc... Although, it seems like something like this is probably already out there (?)

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

> "I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series." - azure!randals, June 1982

Well worth the read, thanks!

Where are the seminal annoucements being made today? HN? Reddit? It can't still be Usenet, right?

Probably some phpBB somewhere. There are things that start out as a labor of love and a "look at this thing I made" post.

A while ago, someone linked to the HN post entitled "My weekend project called Quora", or something to that effect. Was very interesting to see.

In this very thread, three hours before you posted:

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624657)

But there are bound to be many more really interesting bits buried in Usenet.

Derp, I saw that but stopped reading because I was familiar with the jwz post about old browsers. Thanks for pointing it out.

Here's Python being announced:

(http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.sgi/msg/22662b06471e...)

Here's Ruby sort of being announced:

(http://groups.google.com/group/fj.comp.oops/msg/ab535315595a...)

and also

(http://groups.google.com/group/fj.sources/msg/8e2cc97e3750fb...) (The other six of those are still there)

I think, but I could be wrong, that this is the first mention of a Nintendo Gameboy:

(http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.video/msg/0728382f2...)

wow. Does anyone know where one could get that tarball?

http://browsers.evolt.org/?worldwideweb/NeXT

Lots of other "classic" browsers also mirrored there!

Anyone know where to get the server "WWWDaemon_0.1.tar.Z"?

You could try ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/old/

Here's the oldest so far (1996): ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/old/miniserv/old/webd_4.0B_src.tar.Z

I'm down to '93: ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/httpd/old/WWWDaemon_2.08.tar.Z

I would LOVE to find a copy of 0.1

There is a change history for httpd here: http://www.w3.org/Daemon/Features.html. Goes back to 0.1, but interestingly jumps from 2.06 to 2.12.

If the first couple of years of work on the first web server are missing then that seems to me to be a minor tragedy, given how absolutely vital this technology has since become. It would be instructive to be able to track the development of the server and understand the learning process by comparing versions.

I wonder if its worth asking Tim Berners-Lee about this, since he wrote it? http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/#Before

It would definitely be worth it. I would even go so far as calling it a _major_ tragedy if the 0.1 was lost, and would also want to urge CERN to set-up a webserver (at least emulating) running the 0.1 accepting connections on :2784 (the original port used for testing AFAIR).

Maybe Henrik Frystyk or some of the other early contributors have a copy laying about.

EDIT: Just sent a mail to Frystyk. Someone with a direct or indirect connection to TimBL should also try and contact him.

EDIT1: Apparently not. frystyk@microsoft.com doesn't work anymore :( Trying a different route.

Frystyk has joined the cause: https://twitter.com/#!/frystyk/status/173128770763501568

Thanks to a redditor we seem to have found the C to 0.2, 0.1 AND 0.0 :) http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/q4e57/help_save_the...

Amazing effort. Thanks @playern and all the reditors who worked at this.

Now that these versions have been found, what should be done with them so we don't have to do this again in twenty years time?

I think the found versions should be available on the W3 ftp server along with the later versions. The CERN HTTPD page (http://www.w3.org/Daemon/) has "Dan Connolly httpd@w3.org" at the bottom. He might be the person to approach to arrange this.

I also wonder if all the versions should be of the server and browser should be archived on archive.org. They have the infrastructure and organisation to ensure that important cultural artifacts are not lost. There may be copyright issues though.

Given my negligible role in this compared to the people who did the real work, I don't want to jump in and contact these organisations unless nobody else wants to.

What do you think?

Jump in!

As we speak, there are torrents, sourceforge projs, and a github repo with the files. But those should be considered backups; The best place for the tarballs (if we find them all) would be at ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/ (the original source), and the src should be on w3.org as you suggested.

So, please do jump in :) I'm already behind on several "real" projects because of this :)

JWZ has some information about running ancient browsers, which tend to fail because of the HOST header.

(http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-brows...)

Google has a handy list of other interesting early announcements to Usenet:

(http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html)

I remember the version of IE (2?) that shipped with some version of Windows didn't support the Host header and as a result, couldn't access microsoft.com properly, which one had to do to upgrade IE.

I think you're referring to NT4 which shipped with IE2. IE3 was released a month later and was included with some later CDs.

I would love to get this compiled and running under modern OS X, but it looks like quite a lot of the app depends on stuff in the nib, and XCode/Interface Builder's file format has changed so many times since then that there's no way to convert it.

Anyone have a bunch of old Macs with varying old versions of IB/XCode installed to bring the nib in there up to a modern format, one version at a time?

Doesn't appear to be available as source.

Does anybody remember "Internet in a Box" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box)? I remember back in the day I was so excited to purchase my own browser software. My how things have changed.

I think I still have the box somewhere at home. I should donate it to the Computer History Museum.

I remember -- I think it was 1992 -- being one of the first "normal" people on the internet. Got in through a service called Delphi.

It had a menu option to use www. The screen came up with white text on a black background. Some words were in reverse -- black text on a white background.

I remember thinking "Weird. What would anybody ever use this stuff for?"

After all, it wasn't like it was as useful as ftp, telnet, gopher, etc. It was just a bunch of text in a weird format. (Remember there was no mouse then. I imagine you had to tab to get on the links? Never found out, because I couldn't figure out what to do with it.)

I have actually used it. What a terrible browser! Every link opens new window? No thanks! and so many menus.. the only good thing is the included editor (i love colored text)...

Sorry Tim, i will try ViolaWWW instead which looks more promising. In every case, nothing beats CD-ROMs

So cool. I love seeing this sort of history. Thanks for posting!

The web's big bang ?

It'll never catch on.

It needs traction and to solve the chicken-and-egg problem. There is not many documents to look at, and to make people look at all these documents you need many people to put up their documents on such a proposed web, and in a special form!

it needs a better name to get recognition. 'double-u double-u double-u' is hard to pronounce.

It's actually in the Bible in some languages... Revelation 8:13 has "woe woe woe" which is "wee wee wee" in dutch, which does translate to "double-u double-u double-u"

they better check if it's not something offensive in chinese.

I usually say "triple-double-u" when I reference it verbally. I had a project manager long ago that would say dub-dub-dub and it just sounded silly to me.

Back in the mid 90s a colleague embarked on a (fruitless) attempt to get all the people he knwe to call their Web hosts 'web' as in web.example.com. A shame that he failed, I feel.

That was always my preferred alternative. WWW just sounds kinda stupid, especially when people try to read out a URL on TV or radio.

Considering that people still type www even when asked to go to an IP address, I'm not sure this would have changed anything in regards to non-technicals' understanding of how the internet works.

Unless httpd is running on a different server from your second-level domain, and your primary use of your second-level domain is something other than serving http, then the use of a www subdomain is silly. Changing it to "web" makes it no less silly. There once was a movement to do away with it, but sadly http://no-www.org/ appears to have been essentially abandoned -- or at least very rarely updated.

You wouldn't believe how many webservers still can't direct you to the page without the www, I'm afraid.

dub-dub-dub

trip-dub

Amusingly, it requires more syllables to say ‘W.W.W.’ than it does to say ‘World wide web’.

"triple-dub".

Or 'dub-dub-dub'

Bush middle name-esque: dubya dubya dubya

Gopher is already too well established.

Yeah, and Gopher seems better organized than messy pages with links scattered here and there.

The only purpose I can see for this is another advertising channel.

it has no business model.

While not entirely correct, this point is probably more true than timbl would have preferred.

Sure is Reddit in here.

Jesus Christ, no kidding. That was almost painful to see on here. If anyone is wondering, this is when it's appropriate to hit a thread with a barrage of down votes.

Sure is lack of humor around here. Is there an unwritten rule at HN that if something is chuckle-worthy, it's automatically not worth seeing?

Downvote away!

That's not what occurred here. What we have is a dozen people chiming in with short, "funny" comments that add nothing to the discussion. It was maybe a step away from a classic pun-thread and that is most certainly unwelcome. We don't dislike humor, but maybe we know when it's appropriate and when it's just nonsense spewed onto a page, over and over.

It does add something to the discussion, and rather succinctly at that.

It shows the type of dissent/criticisms new ideas hear. Some of these retorts did seem very reasonable back then. There is perhaps something to be learned from this hindsight.

Most of us have heard these common criticisms a dozen times or more. Merely writing them, one after to another, so that you can stand back and gaze at the irony you've just fabricated is not insightful and it doesn't add to the discussion.

A single commenter could have succinctly identified that this is one of those rare occassions where the common wisdom of startups did not apply, and in fact practically spat in the face of it. We didn't need all the noise or attention seeking.

Well, here are, for example, these[0] posts, chuckle-worthy and worth seeing (thought-provoking, demonstrating how wrong yet confident we often are when judging innovative ideas and projects). While these[1] short remarks IMO better belong to Reddit.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624604 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624721 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624648 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624793

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3626067 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3624808 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3625825

No, all of these are a waste of everyone's time.

There are two problms with type-[0] comments. 1) They lead to type-[1] comments. 2) Humor posts are too easy to upvote, and can drown insightful or informative posts.

Disclaimer: I posted on of the [0] comments, and came back here to apologize when I saw how many upvotes it got.

According to Wired Magazine, the web is "not hot". People are sick of looking at pictures of your cat.

This story is from 1991. Mentioning this in the title would be helpful.

A year ago there would have been no question this was a joke. Now, I'm not so sure.

Well, my first thought was: "what hubris is this?", before taking note of the archaic name and the domain name and figuring it was probably an interesting old Usenet post. Adding [1991] would perhaps prevent someone from missing it through a similar line of thought?

Yeah, I saw the name and [google.com] (missing the [groups.] part) and the first comment quoting the revolution... I was bracing myself.

it's fairly common to ask for the year to be included in submission titles that are old. It helps clarify for the reader that we're going to see something out of computer history (or general world history) rather than something brand new.

Why can't I read this on my iPhone? For some reason, it asks me to log in.

Google groups lies! The author was Al Gore!

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