30 years of WWW


Userlevel 7
Badge +17

30 years ago today, CERN made the WWW available to the public free of charge. The beginning of the Web as we know it today.

 

https://www.home.cern/science/computing/birth-web


What is your earliest experience with or memory of the WWW?

How did it influence your life and professional career?


18 comments

Userlevel 7
Badge +16

You’re asking me to remember something more than a month ago, let alone 30yrs ago. That’s asking for a lot Jochen 🤣😂 Honestly, I don’t even remember. I think I may have looked up a weather site, which is a field I would’ve went in (meterology) if not tech.

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

You’re asking me to remember something more than a month ago, let alone 30yrs ago. That’s asking for a lot Jochen 🤣😂 Honestly, I don’t even remember. I think I may have looked up a weather site, which is a field I would’ve went in (meterology) if not tech.

😂😂😂 Oh come on, you don’t remember when you first used the WWW? Ok, perhaps it was so special to me that I remember...


I didn’t hear from this WWW until 1993 - I think. And the first time I could get my hands on it was in October/November 1994… but I was text based only, without pictures or different fonts via an IBM host system 😎 First time I could use it with a Mosaic Browser on an OS/2 PC has to be in 1995…
So I was not in the first user group, but at least I have started in the first years of the WWW. The big discussion in these years was if companies should be allowed to advertise and sell goods….

Userlevel 7
Badge +22

I remember pressing the link and then waiting as the page slowly filled the screen :) This is after the fun of a pulse dialup modem.

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

I remember pressing the link and then waiting as the page slowly filled the screen :) This is after the fun of a pulse dialup modem.

Ohh yeah, this unique modem sound…

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Hard to believe it has been 30 years wow.  Just in time for starting to go to bars.  🤣

Userlevel 7
Badge +22

I remember pressing the link and then waiting as the page slowly filled the screen :) This is after the fun of a pulse dialup modem.

Ohh yeah, this unique modem sound…

 

That was a fast one. I had at first a 33.6 I think it was…  Do you remember this: 

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +16

Nope...don’t really remember. I was in the Air Force at the time...that’s all I remember. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Userlevel 7
Badge +22

Nope...don’t really remember. I was in the Air Force at the time...that’s all I remember. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Yeah but at home?. At the time at work I was  on a SCO Unix dumb terminal :) with very strict limitations but at home… :) Well at home I had less supervision :)

Userlevel 7
Badge +16

At home? No way...I couldn’t afford a PC on an Airman’s salaray, and at the time with a family….let alone having Internet also at home 😂

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

I remember pressing the link and then waiting as the page slowly filled the screen :) This is after the fun of a pulse dialup modem.

Ohh yeah, this unique modem sound…

 

That was a fast one. I had at first a 33.6 I think it was…  Do you remember this: 

 

Oh yes, Netscape Navigator was the second browser I have used after Mosaic. 😀 It was a great improvement at this time…

Userlevel 7
Badge +16

I do remember preferring Netscape, eventually, over any other browser. I liked the lighthouse (it did have a lighthouse, right?) 😊

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Definitely remember that good old modem sound for sure when I lived at my dad’s.  Even using Netscape browser too.  😂

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

And after the modem sound was over, then the anxious looking at the online time and calculation the telephone cost. I don’t know if this was in other countries, too. In Germany the telephone costs were rather high, so you couldn’t be online for hours…

And… no one else could use the telephone during your online sessions, because the line was blocked by the modem connection. 😉

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

30 years ago today, CERN made the WWW available to the public free of charge. The beginning of the Web as we know it today.

 

https://www.home.cern/science/computing/birth-web


What is your earliest experience with or memory of the WWW?

How did it influence your life and professional career?

 

Hah….30 years ago I was 12.  That’d put me solidly in 6th Grade.  At this point or shortly thereafter, my internet was pretty limited...we had a dial-up connection at school that would connect us to the Education Service Unit.  We had a Gateway 2000 server and some classrooms had a computer, all networked together.  The couple of computers on the network could access the internet by connecting to the server that would perform the dialing-up and proxy the internet to that computer.

A couple years later as a Freshman, I remember dialing up from a laptop with really poor screen, TFT as I recall.

At home, I had an IBM Aptiva 540 with a 2400 baud modem where I would dial-up into the local Community College’s BBS.  I could also dial-up a friend and play a couple of games against him.  Eventually I upgraded to a 14.4 modem and then 33.6 and had dial-up from a local ISP.  I somehow went through life without having America Online, though I did use all of the free floppies they sent me in the mail….

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

I remember pressing the link and then waiting as the page slowly filled the screen :) This is after the fun of a pulse dialup modem.

Oh gosh...I forgot that I had to dial-up with pulse.  Most of the world had touch-tone I think, but out on the farm, we still dealt with pulse dialing.

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

I remember pressing the link and then waiting as the page slowly filled the screen :) This is after the fun of a pulse dialup modem.

Ohh yeah, this unique modem sound…

 

I have a couple modems in the garage...one is still sealed in plastic.  I used to keep a couple around for remote access to security systems, but now I pretty much just collect the stuff because...nostalgia I guess.

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Ok, then your school had a lot more eqiupment to connect to the internet in 1993 than my school. 😂 We had just some PCs in school - without networking and internet...

My first contact with the internet was during my studies in 1994…

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Ok, then your school had a lot more eqiupment to connect to the internet in 1993 than my school. 😂 We had just some PCs in school - without networking and internet...

My first contact with the internet was during my studies in 1994…

I can’t quite remember what exactly we had…..it was a parochial school so we had a couple things.  Our lab consisted of 10 or so Apple IIe’s.  All but one had a monochrome monitor.  If you were first in line, you got the color monitor.  Oregon Trail on 5.25” floppies never looked so good, and I was learning both high and low resolution graphic programming on Apple BASIC.

When I went on to high school, we had some terminals that connected to some sort of server...I don’t know the details other than they were using token-ring.  The summer between Freshman and Sophomore year, I was recruited to help assemble some HP Vectra workstations - basically open them up, install a NIC and plug them into this fancy new ethernet network.  That would have been the summer of ‘96.

Comment