[ih] Copy of first web page discovered

[Dave Crocker]

On 5/31/2013 7:35 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Fun, but of course it still isn't the first web page. That
> was text-only and the browser was called www. I don't think
> anybody has that one.
>
> Even this page makes it clear that info.cern.ch was older.


In terms of the historical arc that has (so far) culminated in creation 
of the web, I'd be especially interested to see the first anonymous FTP 
file or -- much later -- the first gopher page.

(One could argue that telneting to the SRI Augmentation Research 
Center's system was the first serious network-based document archive, 
but the retrieval interface was just terminal emulation and I'd prefer 
it have a network quality to it, such as FTP.)

Anonymous FTP was really the first network-wide standard mechanism for 
publishing and obtaining stray documents around the net.

Gopher was the first globally "integrated" document accessing mechanism 
and was widely used by 1990.

In fact the first time I fully understood what the net would become was 
in 1990, when giving a demo of Internet technology to some phone company 
folks.

There was a gopher page that gave a choice among regions of the world 
and someone in the class suggested the South Pacific choice.  The 
sequence continued through New Zealand and Wellington.  When I saw that 
the next page included a choice of "Town Council" I stopped asking the 
class to make the choice and took over.  Underneath that choice was a 
choice for "Minutes" and indeed, it led to the Wellington New Zealand 
Town Council minutes for a meeting the preceding week.

If non-geeks were willing to publish that sort of material on the net, 
everyone was going to publish everything...

d/


-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net