World's first website is now live again; surprise, it looks like crap

[octoberlib]

In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee and a team at CERN created the World Wide Web and uploaded its very first web page. Appropriately the page was called simply, World Wide Web.
After lying dormant for many years, CERN has decided to re-activate the original website at its original URL. On a post about the project, CERN writes, “This is a 1992 copy of the first website. This may be the earliest copy that we can find, but we’re going to keep looking for earlier ones.”
So what did the World Wide Web look like in 1992? It basically looked like Craigslist does today.


Another fun fact: In then-Intel CEO’s Andy Grove’s 1996 book “Only The Paranoid Survive,” Andy was still on the fence about whether the World Wide Web would prove to be a game changer. Sure, it was a fun novelty, but would anyone ever shop over the Web? Do their banking over the Web? Grove thought not. Less than a decade later, a new world order had arrived and Grove’s skepticism looked ridiculous. It’s got to be – and most likely is – one of the fastest revolutions in human interaction to ever hit the species.
Take a minute to play around at the very first website, where it all started, here.

http://info.cern.ch/


http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/197993/worlds-first-website-is-now-live-again-surprise-it-looks-like-crap/

[mike_c]

1. LOL, you beat me to it by ten minutes....

It looks like FR!

on edit: link to the actual first page: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

[octoberlib]

4. It DOES look like FR!

Republicans are horrible at web design, lol.

[Cirque du So-What]

5. Case in point

[octoberlib]

6. Bwahaha! How awful. nt

[Scootaloo]

14. What? No spinning skull gifs?

Oh! 1991... they hadn't invented pixels back then, and with even supercomputers only having 15kb ram, the spinning skull would kale five years to load and spin about as fast as Jupiter completes an orbit.

[octothorpe]

23. blahahhahahahahahahaha I was just going to say the same thing.

[DCKit]

35. OMG, we all went there.

Then I realized that FR couldn't have been first... they're just preserving the standard. For the sake of history.

[tridim]

2. I wish Steve Jobs was here today to watch his NeXT web server crashing and burning.

Ouch.

[MattBaggins]

11. Was this posted to slashdot

[Cirque du So-What]

3. My goodness, how far we've come

Now we get enticed into clicking on time-sucking links to sites featuring high-minded attractions like '10 Stars We're Not Sure Are Hot,' available at the bottom of the webpage referenced above. Who in that innocent age could have envisioned spam, webporn, cyberchat, social media, phishing, hate sites, internet gambling, and all the other indispensable accoutrements of modern life?

[tridim]

10. A lot of those things were covered by IRC (Internet Relay Chat)

Which was working years before the WWW was invented.

[Cirque du So-What]

12. Yes, but

not everyone used, or had even heard of, IRC back then. Scams, data-mining, identity theft and other banes of our existence hadn't reached the level of sophistication seen today.

[hunter]

7. Looks like crap? I despise useless bling and graphic advertisements on web pages

www.deathandtaxesmag.com... now there's a site that looks like crap.

I much prefer the original cern site.

[Bucky]

19. They should've put blinking marquee text and glittery sparkling unicorn gifs around the edges

Animated gifs also make for exciting wallpaper backgrounds on your website

[Luminous Animal]

8. It is weird to think that only 4 years later, friends of mine were designing web sites like this

http://www.atlasmagazine.com/fall95.html

[alfredo]

20. Exqiste Corpse's original was even worse than that

[Demo_Chris]

9. Bah! It'll never catch on. nt

[ieoeja]

13. Because Microsoft and IBM are notoriously proprietary.

Neither has ever fully implemented ASCII. They're obviously never going to support Internet access. With the two biggest out of the picture, the W3 is going to be very limited.

[FuzzyRabbit]

16. Neither will rock'n'roll.

Just a couple of passing fads.

[MineralMan]

15. I launched my first website in 1995, to support

my little shareware company and to provide a place for users to download my products. It was very bare bones, indeed.

[octothorpe]

24. Did you make liberal use of blink and marquee?

*Well, the admins should get a message about that little problem.

[MineralMan]

26. Nope. I am about information.

Always have been. My sites have always been simple and staightforward. These days I do not even have a site as such. Just blogs.

[MineralMan]

29. I saw your trick there.

It is gone now. It is not good to mess with stuff on other people's sites, I think.

[octothorpe]

30. Well, it wasn't expected, which is why I edited it.

I sent a message to skinner to let him know about it.

[MineralMan]

31. Lots of html stuff is not supported here.

Unexpected results is what it used to be called when I was creating standalone applications.

[octothorpe]

33. Well it's not so much the problem of unfiltered markup messing up the page,

which isn't good, but that's usually fairly harmless. But such things open up the potential for more harmful things. We probably shouldn't even be discussing this until they fix it (some people can be assholes)

[X_Digger]

25. I still have the same domain and email address I registered in the spring of 1996.

I recently ran across an old archive of that site that I'd copied from backup tape 8-9 years back.

[MineralMan]

27. Cool.

I let my url expire in 2011. Do not need a website these days, just a couple of clients.
These days I write content for complete sites. That is what I do best. I leave design to others.

[iwillalwayswonderwhy]

17. I miss hamster dance nt

[alfredo]

18. Still prettier than Drudge Report

[NastyRiffraff]

21. The only surprise is..

the white background. Back in those days the background choices were 50% grey and 50% grey

[hunter]

22. Gray was the default background on the Mosaic web browser, and later Netscape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29

I was using a text only web browser, Lynx, for a long time because my dialup internet connection was so slow there was little reason to use a graphic web browser.

[SteveG]

34. When I started

Lynx was all we had.

[backscatter712]

28. This is the very first web site.

It was put together before CSS, before tables, before Javascript, before AJAZ, back when HTML was little more than a dozen tags or so that let you spruce up a little text, divide it into paragraphs, add headers, add an image or two...

Rimjob, OTOH, has no such excuses.

[aristocles]

32. Memories

When I was a developer with Academic Affairs at The Ohio State University I had a NeXT at home, one of a few donated to OSU by Apple.

With some others I had lunch at the Faculty Club with Steve Jobs. He didn't like the pea soup.

That first website was simple and elegant, like MS-DOS.