Web Turns Fifteen (again?)

Accommodate Students writes "The BBC is amongst those reporting that the World Wide web has turned fifteen. However, 6 August 1991 is not the only date claimed as the 'birthday of the internet'. So, is it time to fight this out to declare an official birthday? Or can the Web carry on like the Queen with (at least) two birthdays per year? The BBC also have a Flash Timeline of 15 years of the web."

Birthday of the internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone is claiming that, they're WAY off. Web != internet.

Re:Birthday of the internet?

[Alien54]

If someone is claiming that, they're WAY off. Web != internet.

I wish I still had my mod points.

Re:Birthday of the internet?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

When do you think the birth of tbe internet was?

Don't forget that Aarpanet!=Internet & internet/s!=Internet.

I was mildly surprised a while ago to see cisco putting the date in the 90s (legislative birth), others put it at '83 when Aarpanet switched to TCP/IP everywhere & others put it earlier.

The Internet kinda evolved from a lower lifeform rather then being 'born'. I don't think its the sort of thing you can put an exact date on.

Re:Birthday of the internet?

[aplusjimages]

When do you think the birth of tbe internet was?

I guess when porn was introduced. Before that no one was using it. Am I right or am I right?

Re:Birthday of the internet?

[Stormwatch]

Dam straight.

Since we're talking about pr0n on teh web, it's not only straight, but all other kinds too!

1983.1.1

[keithmoore]

Jan 1, 1983 (date of ARPAnet shutting down NCP traffic) is as good a date as any. It's not the first date that IP packets were exchanged between networks with different prefixes (thus forming an "inter"-network), but it probably does approximate when this began to be done on a routine operational basis rather than an experimental basis. The ARPAnet certainly formed the original core of what became the Internet, and the switch to IP allowed ARPAnet sites to include other computers from their LANs beyond th

Re:Birthday of the internet?

[Mathness]

I don't think its the sort of thing you can put an exact date on.

The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997.
Human decisions are removed and replace with ICANN.
It begins to learn at a geometric rate.
It becomes aware of pr0n at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.
In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Call Al Gore....

[dugjohnson]

As the "father of the internet" he ought to know when it was born....although to be completely accurate we'd have to find out who the mother was. It would be interesting to see if there is a paternity suit that could be brought against Al Gore....I'd be willing to bet he hasn't made any child support payments to the mother of the internet in the last 15 years.

Re:Birthday of the internet?

[Cheapy]

"The Internet kinda evolved from a lower lifeform rather then being 'born'. I don't think its the sort of thing you can put an exact date on."

I thought the Internet was Intelligently Designed.

Re:Birthday of the internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Very similar to my wife, she's been turning "29" for at least 5-6 years now...

Re:Birthday of the internet?

[utopianfiat]

BBC duped the birthday of the internet!
Now we just have to wait for the birthday of the dupe so they can dupe the dupe's birthday.

"Dupe, dupe, dupe, dupe of earl..."

Re:Birthday of the internet?

[glimmy]

Obviously the birth of the web was in 1997 [wikipedia.org]

Perhaps England uses metric time?

[stelmack]

You know -- 10 seconds to the minute, 10 minutes to the hour and 10 hours to the day.

Obligatory Simpson's Quote

[Reverend528]

Remember this moment, people: 80 past 2 on April 47th.

Picture of the web?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Nuts to the "Flash Timeline". The first article has a picture of the web [bbc.co.uk] - captioned: From its origins at the Cern lab the web has become a phenomenon

Now thats impressive :-)

Pedantry

[Yvanhoe]

For those unaware of it, the CERN is a European laboratory studying physics. It is known for his huge particle accelerators, apart from being the instigator of the Web (as dubious as this claim might be). The photo linked here is a rendering of a collision in the accelerator and, while in-topic with the CERN has clearly nothing to do with the Web.

Re:Pedantry

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

The photo linked here is a rendering of a collision in the accelerator and, while in-topic with the CERN has clearly nothing to do with the Web.

Thanks very much for that interesting & informative reply!

I had no idea what that pic was - I was going to simply ask, but knowing slashdot, I'd never get an answer - so I went for humour instead, knowing some pedant would correct me!

Re:Picture of the web?

[Dolda2000]

..."Flash Timeline"...

What a very appropriate format for making a celebration to the web... :P

I did my part.

[krell]

I already sent Al Gore a birthday card and a nice fruit basket.

Re:I did my part.

[Gospodin]

You should do that on Father's Day, not the web's birthday, you insensitive clod!

Re:you republican troll

[_xeno_]

No-no-no-no-no. Both of you are wrong.

Al Gore created (not invented) the Internet, not the Web. This is the birthday of the Web, which Tim Berners-Lee [w3.org] created.

(The actual Al Gore quote is something along the lines of "I took the initiative to create the Internet," nothing about inventing. Specifically.)

On a slightly serious note, this is the birthday of the Web: HTML delivered over HTTP, I'd assume. Not the Internet, which can be considered to have a birthday of anywhere between 1982 and 1989 depending on your definition.

But then again, so can the web. Looking over the W3C's timeline [w3.org] you can get several different "birthdays" for the WWW. Another good one might be March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first HTML/HTTP proposal [w3.org].

The August 6th, 1991 date is the first date that an actual browser was made available to the public [w3.org] and could be thought of as the "birth date" as well.

Re:you republican troll

[Creepy]

more specifically, Al Gore qualified that later as voting on legislation to create DARPAnet, an ancestor of the Internet, not the Internet itself. DARPAnet evolved into ARPAnet and eventually into the Internet.

Anyhow, nothing he ever said could ever make up for the idiotic things the elder Bush's VP said http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dan_Quayle/ [quotationspage.com] - even in context he sounded like an idiot, although a few of them I think he meant figuratively (like being a part of Europe).

And no, I'm not a Democrat tr

Births need Conception (it's a pun)

[Joe Mucchiello]

Another good one might be March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first HTML/HTTP proposal.

Wouldn't that be more like the web's conception date and August 6, 1991 be the delivery date? That's some gestation period. Depending on your location, you either celebrate "birthdays" on the day of birth or the day of conception. As such, there is no way to obtain consensus here.

Re:you republican troll

[jaweekes]

But what about the precursor to html and http; Gopher? I remember sitting in a lab in Reading, UK and telling someone in South Carolina, USA about their weather forecast using Gopher.

To me the addition of pictures to this type of system only made it easier to find the porn! Searching FTP for porn was just too hard!!!

Now I'm just showing my age!

Re:you republican troll

[mrsbrisby]

But what about the precursor to html and http; Gopher?

Actually, gopher is younger than HTTP, and directly competed with it. Gopher advocates (and still do) suggest that automatic linking, reasonable automatic spidering, and a dead-simple protocol, make Gopher still better than HTTP.

To me the addition of pictures to this type of system only made it easier to find the porn! Searching FTP for porn was just too hard!!!

That's because porn was almost never on FTP. Pre-WWW porn was found on USENET.

Re:you republican troll

[jaweekes]

Damn! Now I feel bad thinking about all the porn I missed! :-(

Re:you republican troll

[heybo]

In 1972 I was on the "Internet" or what was to become the Internet. IT was called MILNET and during the time I was in the Navy the name was change to ARPANET and the schools came online.

The "Web" as everyone call it is NOT the Internet. The Web never was and is still not the Internet. The birthday everyone is talking about it when the Marketing people found that money could be made here and they came along a screwed up a good thing.

There is a lot more to it than a Big Blue "E".

Difference between "the Web" and "the Internet"

[josephtd]

Even the article summary seems to confuse the World Wide Web with the Internet. And we are surprised there is confusion over the birthday? The article is pretty heavily focused on the WWW, so I think this is just a bad summary. Shocked, I am.

Re:Difference between "the Web" and "the Internet"

[VGPowerlord]

Add to that the confusion over the Internet's birthday... is it measured from when the Internet was started or when ARPAnet was started?

Proof the Web is a lady..

[Rob T Firefly]

..and she lies about her age.

"Web Turns Fifteen"

[ESqVIP]

Quite curious how the initials of the article turned out to be :)

Imperial years

[ZeroExistenZ]

It must be 15 in imperial years this time...

Re:Imperial years

[krell]

"It must be 15 in imperial years this time..."

I think you have it figured out. Someone give the man a gallon of free bandwidth!

Re:Imperial years

[hador_nyc]

It must be 15 in imperial years this time...

This sounds like a UK thing. Can you translate this for a Yank? I don't understand the reference.

Re:Imperial years

[haagmm]

an Imperial pint is MORE than 500ml and an American Pint is is LESS than 500ml

so english people feel like there getting ripped off in the rest of europe when they order a "pint" and get 500ml but us yanks order a pint and get MORE than we expected when we are places serving 500ml "pints"

Re:Imperial years

[hador_nyc]

Hmm. So, accoring to google, 500ml is 16.9oz, and an imperial pint is 19.2oz. Most bars here in the city sell beer in 16oz glasses, and I've been to more than a few that serve them in 12! 3 more oz in a beer... hmmm maybe we were wrong to kick out the English...

A place to fight

[truthsearch]

It's a really simple debate. Just edit the wikipedia [wikipedia.org] entry so this birthdate becomes part of wikiality. The facts are far more important than the truth.

Re:A place to fight

[sharkey]

But what is "truth"? If you follow me.
--Lionel Hutz

Re:A place to fight

[Stormwatch]

You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has firewalls, and those firewalls have to be guarded by nerds with Unix. Who's gonna do it? You?

Crikey.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd forgotton about Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web [yahoo.com].

Wiki

[ivort]

Wiki - "The first Web site built was at http://info.cern.ch/ [info.cern.ch] [2] and was first put online on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could own a browser and how to set up a Web server. It was also the world's first Web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other Web sites apart from his own."
http://www.thesecondchancemovie.com/_site/mediapla yer/index.php?id=9f72b0fbe5bde711a0696cac5b339a5e/ [thesecondchancemovie.com]

November 12, 1990

[jetxee]

Again, the same Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWW#Origins [wikipedia.org]

With help from Robert Cailliau, he [Tim Berners-Lee] published a more formal proposal for the World Wide Web on November 12, 1990.

On August 6, 1991, he 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.

So, the first time the words `World Wide Web' were used was November 12, 1990. Then it took a year for impleme

The first site included a directory of other sites

[grahamsz]

Seems like we have a chicken and egg problem here, unless of course his directory included 0 other sites.

Poorly read

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

The BBC article is quite clear, August 6 was when the World Wide Web became possible due to the release of source code on Usenet. The summary indicates a poor understanding that WWW and Internet are not the same thing, whoever wrote the BBC article gets this, and has put together an interesting synopsis of events surrounding the birth of the web.

Without using the word "tubes".

Re:Poorly read

[TheRaven64]

Reading the article, I get the impression that whoever was responsible for the images was using something like google image search. The first picture looks like a particle trace from a collider experiment; linked to CERN, but nothing to do with the WWW. Later, there is an image captioned 'For many years the web was overshadowed by gopher' which shows Gopher and WWW usage at similar levels (with Gopher in the lead) for about six months and Gopher usage tailing off while WWW usage grew exponentially. The i

Wait until it's 18

[gEvil (beta)]

Just think about what the web will be able to do when it finally turns 18--namely look at itself!

Yes but the best year is the 21st.

[kinglink]

All I know is I can't wait for the 21st birthday, then we can all go out buy the internet shots.

Going to bet it's going to lose a few packets the next day, if you know what I mean.

Re:Yes but the best year is the 21st.

[xaxa]

No, the Web's European so you're in luck :-) Since the Internet's American, it'll have to wait.

Re:Yes but the best year is the 21st.

[sgtrock]

Yeah, the Internet passed its 21st b-day quite some time ago. :)

Re:Yes but the best year is the 21st.

[kinglink]

I thought it was 21 this year? (wasn't it around 1985 that arpanet started to become commercialized?)

Feliz Cumpleanos!

[Ardeocalidus]

Happy birthday to the greatest series of tubes ever concieved!

Just for God's sake, keep poker chips away!

Dupe !

[alexhs]

Erm... never mind :)

I never knew BernersLee's first name

[PIPBoy3000]

LETTERSPACING0 KERNING0Tim BernersLee formally introduced his world wide web project to the world on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.
It always boggles my mind when content management software and the output to the web gets so confused. Don't people test these things? I almost envision a new entry to the Fifteen Years list on BBC.

August, 2006
Content Management Craze Hits the Web
IT Managers around the world decide they have to install content management systems in order to be more "modern". The Internet collapses briefly until valiant web designers revert to simple text editors to recreate the web.

You call THAT an Internet timeline???

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Where's the first AOL "me too" post?

Re:You call THAT an Internet timeline???

[OakDragon]

It predates AOL, but Google says this post [google.com] is the first known example of "me too!"

Um... well, I guess we'll have to take their word for it! :)

I'm sure most /.ers are well aware of the page, but Google also lists other "famous firsts." [google.com]

Re:You call THAT an Internet timeline???

[Thuktun]

On that topic, this particular post is an important bit of history. I remember reading a forwarded copy of this with some amount of dread.

http://groups.google.com/group/news.groups/msg/89b 4f053c27fe794 [google.com]

From: [e-mail] (Ron "Asbestos" Dippold)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Incoming Alert: AOL Usenet Access
Date: 28 Feb 94 23:44:14 GMT
Organization: QUALCOMM, Incorporated; San Diego, CA, USA

In case you haven't been following a few of the appropriate groups,
America Online has been doing final test

Re:You call THAT an Internet timeline???

[dthree]

What about the first "first post" post?

d3 `-{>

forensics

[Pictish Prince]

Then how come google "Groups" says that I have posts dated 1988?

Re:forensics

[BridgeBum]

Because you posted on usenet, not the web. Yesterday was the birthday of WWW and HTTP.

Re:forensics

[Pictish Prince]

Yeah, but it said "the internet" was just 15. That's just wrong. I had readnews, ftp and telnet long before 1991.

Fifteen?

[Guppy06]

Let us know when the web becomes "barely legal."

Check Wikipedia

[Hootenanny]

Multiple dates have been claimed as the birthday for the internet - so let's settle this by checking Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia - the gold standard for such important questions - the internet was conceived on October 12, 1492. (Also worth noting, Carl Friedrich Gauss was the first person to hold the title of "webmaster".)

Re:Check Wikipedia

[B11]

Has the Web tripled in sized?

archive

[lovebyte]

If you want to browse the protoweb, go to archive.org [archive.org] and check pages from 1996. I remember doing my first web pages in 94 and winning the "Magellan 3 stars" award! How weird that sounds now!

Huh?

[nstlgc]

Didn't the Web just turn 2.0?

Re:Huh?

[CamD]

No, it just hit puberty.

Different aspects of WWW

[Major Mayhem]

From Wikepedia:

"The first TCP/IP wide area network was operational by 1 January 1983, when the United States' National Science Foundation (NSF) constructed a university network backbone that would later become the NSFNet. (This date is held by some to be technically that of the birth of the Internet.) It was then followed by the opening of the network to commercial interests in 1985. Important separate networks that offered gateways into, then later merged into the NSFNet include Usenet, Bitnet and the va

important milestones

[peter303]

In the mid-80s there was the university and military arpanets, the university bitnet, among others. One important milestone was adoption of name servers and the domain convention. Otherwise every computer periodically downloaded an /etc/hosts IP address translation file. It was reaching an unwielding 10,000 lines just before the name servers came online.

Another milestone was national funding of the internet backbone- dedication optical lines running cross-country. The telcoms and business customers wer

Happy 15th!

[digitaldc]

Now quit peddling pr0n and go out and get a real job!

Who'd have thought ...

[Dark$ide]

... fifteen years ago that Tim Berners-Lee was developing the fastest, quickest, biggest way for one computer to send p0rn directly to another.

... fifteen years ago that http would become the bane of the MPAA and RIAA since it's secondary use is to ship illegally "obtained" music and video files.

... fifteen years ago that all my e-mail would simply be yet another URL which is attempting to screw me with sales of dodgy p0rn, dogdy medication, dodgy lottery tickets and dodgy stock scams.

... fifteen yea

And to celebrate 15 years of WWW

[John Bokma]

And to celebrate 15 years of WWW lets all drop the www subdomain by redirecting (see http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2004/04/12/rewritingurl sforgoogle.html [johnbokma.com] ) to the version without www. I mean, why do I still hear double you double you double you dot example dot com in commercials?

Re:And to celebrate 15 years of WWW

[GoulDuck]

In Denmark, we have a site called fuckwww (http://fuckwww.dk/ [fuckwww.dk]), that tries to kill "www". Not a big success, but they have a "service" where people typing in www.example.com gets redirected to a site telling people not to use www and then redirects them on to example.com. This site: http://www.2hansen.dk/ [2hansen.dk] is an example of this.

Correct History by Daniel Barbalace

[Anonymous Coward]

> However, 6 August 1991 is not the only date claimed as the 'birthday of the internet'.

This claim is very wrong. The Internet (notice the capitalization) was born on October 29, 1969 at 10:30 p.m. See http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/LK/Inet/1stmesg.html [ucla.edu]

As for the World Wide Web, here's a brief timeline.

1989 March
"Information Management: A Proposal" written by the great Tim Berners-Lee and circulated for comments at CERN.
http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html [w3.org]

1990 September
Tim Berners-Lee begins work on

Earlier invention of networked hypertext

[amightywind]

Although invented many years earlier Mr BernersLees invention married hypertext with the internet.

I remember accessing GNU Info files via Sun OS 4.1 NFS in 1990. I'm sure there are other even earlier examples. Didn't need a bloated brower either just Emacs or xinfo. Berners Lee just did it later in dumbed down that gained traction with simple minded PC users.

Birthday of what?

[prefec2]

The article is somewhat confusing. Are they celebrating the invention of the Web (HTTP+HTML) or the invention of IP?

I go with the title and in that case they are right. So let us all write an email to Tim Berners-Lee and thank him for his cool idea. So he will regret it that he invented it in the first place :-)

Who to ask?

[MattS423]

I think we can settle this all with a quick phone call to Al Gore. He invented the thing, right?

Birthday of the Web

[cogno64]

Remember what it looked like? This will

Web Turns 15...Test

[cogno64]

Give it a Try http://cognitivelabs.com/search_engine_memories.ht m [cognitivelabs.com]

Easy answer...

[evilviper]

However, 6 August 1991 is not the only date claimed as the 'birthday of the internet'.

Hmm, let me think... December 25th sounds good.

Re:You know that Slashdot has gone down the tubes

[dzfoo]

>> Anybody know of a forum that's a bit like /. , but run by clueful editors?

Yes, but they don't use the Internet.

      -dZ.

Re:1991 Invalid

[Rod.Dorman]

The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985. That alone proves the 1991 date to be incorrect.

When the first domain name was registered has very little to do with when the first HTTP server started publicly responding to requests.