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We’ve come a long way…
My girlfriend’s birthday is this coming week. While searching for the perfect gift for my sweetheart, I realized that I completely forgot about the World Wide Web’s birthday! The World Wide Web actually turned 15 last month and is now in its late teens (perhaps that’s why there are so many social networking sites popping up).
According to Wikipedia: On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.
“The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere. […] The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!” —from Tim Berners-Lee’s first message
I usually celebrate the birthday by looking at embarrassing baby pictures. The photos are stored in a little something called the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a Web site that enables anyone to see what a particular Web site looked like at some time in the past - from 1996 to the present.
I’m sure a lot of current web developers would hate to have you see their baby pictures. Mainly because the internet in 1996 appears like it had been created in its entirety by 14-year-olds with Geocities accounts who had about half an hour to spare each night before bedtime.
One outstanding exception is the Precedent website from 1996, don’t you think?
Hey you! Just because I’m on the other side of the world doesn’t mean I won’t catch you having a giggle at my work! Yes that was probably my second day of attempting web design for Precedent - that was back when on-line meant we had a computer plugged in rather than that we were linked to the great WWW. Good thing our design and development skills developed over the years!