[ih] Copy of first web page discovered

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 31/05/2013 18:58, Dave Crocker wrote:
> 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...

What is rather sad, and typical of a major emerging problem, is
that the Wellington City Council web site only offers Council
minutes back to 2006, and my Google-foo has failed to find any
trace of material as ancient as 1990. No doubt they have the
minutes from 1890 and 1990 in their paper archives, but there is
a real problem with bit rot.

   Brian