{"id":1458,"date":"2010-05-24T07:39:46","date_gmt":"2010-05-24T14:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/?p=1458"},"modified":"2015-04-23T06:49:28","modified_gmt":"2015-04-23T13:49:28","slug":"the-first-website-ever-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2010\/05\/the-first-website-ever-made\/","title":{"rendered":"The First Website Ever Made"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"pf-content\"><div id=\"attachment_1470\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/firsteverwebserver.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1470\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1470\" title=\"first ever webserver\" src=\"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/firsteverwebserver-e1274711960864.jpg\" alt=\"first ever webserver\" width=\"350\" height=\"262\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/firsteverwebserver-e1274711960864.jpg 350w, http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/firsteverwebserver-e1274711960864-340x255.jpg 340w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1470\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The First Ever Machine to Run a Web Server<\/p><\/div>\n<p><a href='http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com' title='Interesting Facts'>Today I found out<\/a> what the first website ever made was.\u00a0 Simply put, it was a website made by the World Wide Web&#8217;s creator Tim Berners-Lee, who was working for CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).<\/p>\n<p>The first ever website was published on August 6, 1991 and served up a page explaining the World Wide Web project and giving information on how users could setup a web server and how to create their own websites and web pages, as well as how they could search the web for information.\u00a0 The URL for the first ever web page put up on the first ever website was http:\/\/info.cern.ch\/hypertext\/WWW\/TheProject.html<\/p>\n<p>This link is no longer active and, unfortunately, nobody bothered to make a copy of this original page, which tended to be updated daily anyways.\u00a0 The earliest version of it that was recorded was in 1992 and a copy of that page can be found <a title=\"Earliest Copy of Original Website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/History\/19921103-hypertext\/hypertext\/WWW\/TheProject.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The first ever web browser, called WorldWideWeb, was also created by Tim Berners-Lee.\u00a0 This browser had a nice graphical user interface; allowed for multiple fonts and font sizes; allowed for downloading and displaying images, sounds, animations, movies, etc.; and had the ability to let users edit the web pages being viewed in order to promote collaboration of information.\u00a0 However, this browser only ran on NeXT Step&#8217;s OS, which most people didn&#8217;t have because of the high cost of these systems (this company was owned by Steve Jobs, so you can imagine the cost bloat ;-)).<\/p>\n<p>In order to provide a browser anyone could use, the next browser he developed was much simpler and, thus, versions of it could be quickly developed to be able to run on just about any computer, pretty much regardless of processing power or operating system.\u00a0 It was a bare-bones inline browser (command line \/ text only), which didn&#8217;t have most of the features of his original browser, but at least could be used on pretty much any computer out there at the time and allowed people to access the information on the web.<\/p>\n<p>The first web server was also written by Tim Berners-Lee called CERN HTTPd, the latter part standing for &#8220;Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon&#8221;.\u00a0\u00a0 For those not familiar, a daemon is simply a program that more or less runs in the background on a system doing whatever it is programmed to do; in this case, listening for and responding to requests for web pages that exist on the machine it is running on; thus this daemon would be called a &#8220;server&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>If you liked this article and the <span id=\"bonusfacts\">Bonus<\/span> Facts below, you might also enjoy:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2014\/09\/history-internet\/\">Who Invented the Internet?<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2012\/10\/steve-jobs-first-business-was-selling-blue-boxes-that-allowed-users-to-get-free-phone-service-illegally\/\" target=\"_blank\">Steve Jobs&#8217; First Business was Selling &#8220;Blue Boxes&#8221; That Allowed People to Make Free Illegal Phone Calls<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2013\/09\/who-is-craig-from-craigslist\/\">Who is Craig from Craigslist?<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2014\/09\/cunningham-cunninghams-law\/\">Who was Cunningham of Cunningham\u2019s Law?- \u201cThe best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer.\u201d<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2014\/04\/murphy-murphys-law\/\">Who is Murphy of Murphy\u2019s Law?<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span id=\"bonusfacts\">Bonus<\/span> Facts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Tim Berners-Lee initially proposed a project that would later become the web in 1980.\u00a0 Nobody bit on the idea, so much later he decided to do it himself and wrote a more detailed proposal for the web in March of 1989 and then yet another proposal in November of 1990 with the help of Robert Cailliau; this one was finally accepted.\u00a0 These proposals outlined building a system based on &#8220;Hypertext&#8221;, with documents being able to link with other documents on this &#8220;web&#8221; and these documents being able to be viewed through a client browser.\u00a0 This system would then run on top of the already existing internet.\u00a0 In the original proposal, he also wanted all pages to be editable by users so that the authorship of these pages would be universal, with everybody contributing their knowledge.<\/li>\n<li>What made this system unique from existing systems of the day was the marriage of the hypertext system (linked pages) with the internet; particularly the marriage of one directional links that didn&#8217;t require any action by the owner of the destination page to make it work as with bi-directional hyptertext systems of the day.\u00a0 It also vastly simplified the development of web servers and web browsers and was a completely open platform making it so anyone could contribute and develop their own systems without paying any royalties.\u00a0 In the process of doing all this, he developed the URL format, hypertext markup language (HTML), and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).<\/li>\n<li>Around this same time, one of the most popular alternatives to the web (and indeed much more popular than the web at that time), the Gopher system, announced it would no longer be free to use, effectively killing it with everybody switching to the web. (nice move Gopher people, you almost changed the world, but got greedy near the finish line ;-))<\/li>\n<li>A mere one month after his 1990 proposal was accepted, Berners-Lee had built the first web browser, first web server, and written the first web pages, which he subsequently put online and made available for public consumption.<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;\/\/&#8221; forward slashes in any web address actually serve no real purpose according to Berners-Lee.\u00a0 He only put them in because &#8220;it seemed like a good idea at the time.&#8221;\u00a0 He wanted a way to separate the part the web server needed to know about, for instance &#8220;www.todayifoundout.com&#8221;, from the other stuff which is more service oriented.\u00a0 Basically, he didn&#8217;t want to have to worry about knowing what service the particular website was using at a particular link when creating a link in a web page. &#8220;\/\/&#8221; seemed natural, as it would to anyone who&#8217;s used Unix based systems.\u00a0 In retrospect though, this was not at all necessary, so the &#8220;\/\/&#8221; are essentially pointless.<\/li>\n<li>He chose the &#8220;#&#8221; for separating the main part of a document&#8217;s url with the portion that tells what part of the page to go to, because in the United States and some other countries, if you want to specify an address of an individual apartment or suite in a building, you classically precede the suite or apartment number with a &#8220;#&#8221;.\u00a0 So the structure is &#8220;street name and number #suite number&#8221;; thus &#8220;page url #location in page&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>A similar logical thought process was used by the inventor of email, Ray Tomlinson, when he selected the &#8220;@&#8221; symbol to separate the person&#8217;s address with the domain; it seemed natural to say, for instance, &#8220;ray at tomlinson.com&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>Most people use the terms &#8220;World Wide Web&#8221; or just &#8220;web&#8221; and &#8220;internet&#8221; interchangeably, even though these are two very different things.\u00a0 Simply put, the internet is a global network of networks of computers; the web is simply one of the many services available on the internet, providing facilities for accessing and connecting documents and other files available on the internet.<\/li>\n<li>Berners-Lee chose the name &#8220;World Wide Web&#8221; because he wanted to emphasize that, in this global hypertext system, anything could link to anything else.\u00a0 Alternative names he considered were: &#8220;Mine of Information&#8221; (Moi); &#8220;The Information Mine&#8221; (Tim); and &#8220;Information Mesh&#8221; (which was discarded as it looked too much like &#8220;Information Mess&#8221;).<\/li>\n<li>Three of the commonly held &#8220;fathers&#8221; of the actual internet were Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who developed the &#8220;Internet Protocol&#8221; (IP) which defines how packets of a file are to be sent from one machine to another through the internet, and Paul Mockapetris, who developed the Domain Name System (DNS) which, very simply put, maps domain names to IP addresses.\u00a0 Though these three are some of the more famous developers of the internet, there were many others and the original internet from concept to working implementation took about 10 years, starting around 1973 and brought fully online officially around 1983, with some earlier demonstrations such as in 1977 linking SATNET, PRNET, and ARPANET.<\/li>\n<li>The concept of packet switching itself, which is integral to the Internet Protocol (IP), was invented by Paul Barran.<\/li>\n<li>What the IP protocol essentially does is provide a way for packets of information to be sent from one computer to another through the vast internet.\u00a0 Essentially, the packet is like a piece of mail where you&#8217;ve put the address on it; the IP protocol then is used by computers on the internet to determine, basically, what wires to send a packet through that will eventually get the packet to the computer it is addressed to.<\/li>\n<li>The first ever domain registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985.\u00a0 It was registered by the Symbolics Computer Corp.\u00a0 Since that time, well over 200 million domains have been registered, about half of which are registered with the &#8220;.com&#8221; extension.<\/li>\n<li>Berners-Lee&#8217;s original browser was also an editor.\u00a0 His goal here was to allow people to not only browse the information available on the web, but also be able to edit and add information to existing files, not unlike wiki&#8217;s, such as Wikipedia.<\/li>\n<li>Ironically, pronouncing &#8220;www&#8221; as individual letters &#8220;double-u double-u double-u&#8221; takes three times as many syllables as simply saying &#8220;World Wide Web&#8221;.\u00a0 So, as Douglas Adams famously noted, the shortened version of the phrase takes a lot longer to say than the actual phrase.<\/li>\n<li>If you ever wondered about the proper way to write the phrase &#8220;World Wide Web&#8221;, Berners-Lee says, &#8220;World Wide Web is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalized, with no intervening hyphens.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Most web addresses begin with &#8220;www&#8221; because of the traditional practice of naming a server according to the service it provides.\u00a0 So outside of this practice, there is no real reason for any website URL to need to put a &#8220;www&#8221; before the domain name; the administrators of whatever website can set it to put anything they want preceding the domain or nothing at all.\u00a0 This is why, as time goes on, more and more websites have adopted allowing only putting the domain name itself and assuming the user wants to access the web service instead of some other service the machine itself may provide.\u00a0 Thus, the web itself has more or less become the &#8220;default&#8221; service (generally on port 80) on most service hosting machines on the internet.<\/li>\n<li>While the &#8220;www&#8221; is merely on convention and not strictly necessary, &#8220;http:\/\/&#8221; and &#8220;https:\/\/&#8221; specify two different protocols, one secure and one not, and thus one or the other must be included.<\/li>\n<li>The first non-British based web server was setup in the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in December 1991.<\/li>\n<li>By November of 1992, there were 26 web servers running in the world.\u00a0 By October of 1993, there were about 200 web servers in the world.\u00a0 Today there are millions.<\/li>\n<li>Also today, there are an estimated 110 million websites available on the internet with well over 1 trillion unique urls, according to members of the Google Search team.<\/li>\n<li>The web&#8217;s growth was at first fairly slow until the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993.\u00a0 This was a graphical browser developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.\u00a0 Funding for this was through a U.S. government initiative, specifically the &#8220;High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>This act was initiated by Al Gore, which is what he was saying in the Wolf Blitzer interview where many claim he said he invented the internet.\u00a0 Even though his actual quote simply said, &#8220;I took the initiative in creating the Internet&#8221;, as in he introduced the initiative.\u00a0 This sentence, taken out of context, caused confusion over the context of the word &#8220;initiative&#8221; and allowed opponents to construe that he said he invented the internet, which isn&#8217;t what he was saying at all when viewed in context.\u00a0 Ironically, his opponents were actually right though, in a way; he is lying in the above statement.\u00a0 He is saying he introduced the initiative which led to the creation of the internet;\u00a0 in fact, the internet and the web are two very different things.\u00a0 He simply introduced the initiative that funded the web browser (and some other advancements in the internet itself) that helped make the web popular.\u00a0 The internet had been around long before these initiatives.<\/li>\n<li>Prior to Mosaic&#8217;s launch, the web was much less popular than other much older protocols for dealing with files on the internet, such as Gopher and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS).<\/li>\n<li>One of the most important things about Mosaic was it was very easy for every day users to install and use and the creators offered 24 hour phone support to help people get it setup and working on their systems.\u00a0 It also included the ability to view web pages with inline images (instead of in separate windows as other browsers at the time).\u00a0 Other than that though, it wasn&#8217;t nearly as advanced as some other browsers of the day.\u00a0 So really about all that set it apart was simply how easy it was to get setup and working for even people who weren&#8217;t particularly technically oriented.<\/li>\n<li>The first web server was run on a NeXT computer; this computer was also used by Berners-Lee to write the first web browser software.<\/li>\n<li>NeXT computers were relatively high end workstations sold by Steve Job&#8217;s fledgling company NeXT.\u00a0 NeXT computers ran a Unix-based NeXT STEP operation system, not too dissimilar to early versions of OSX.\u00a0 Job&#8217;s love for naming his product with trendy names was evident here as the NeXT machines were more commonly known as &#8220;The Cube&#8221;, due to the casing being a 1 ft x 1 ft x 1 ft die-cast magnesium cube.\u00a0 This computer was not commercially successful due to its relatively high price for what was offered. *looks at Macs*<\/li>\n<li>Apple purchased NeXT in 1996 for 429 Million dollars using the OpenStep OS as the foundation for OSX.<\/li>\n<li>Berners-Lee also founded the W3C at MIT.\u00a0 The W3C oversees the web&#8217;s continued development, setting standards and issuing recommendations on improvements to the web.<\/li>\n<li>Today, among a lot of other things, Berners-Lee is working on a project with the British government to provide, free to anyone, all data acquired for official uses by the UK Government at data.gov.uk.<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;in-line&#8221; console based browser developed by Berners-Lee was actually the first browser I ever used back in the seventh grade on one of my friend&#8217;s computers, who was also the only person I knew who had access to the internet itself.\u00a0 We used it to look up a directory of phone numbers on the web to prank call people a-la-Bart Simpson style.\u00a0 Not a bad &#8220;first usage&#8221; of the web for me, if I do say so myself. \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<li>1990 not only saw the first website go online, but also saw the Hubble Space Telescope set in orbit by the space shuttle Discovery.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<span class=\"collapseomatic \" id=\"id69ef07c50bcdc\"  tabindex=\"0\" title=\"Expand for References:\"    >Expand for References:<\/span><div id=\"target-id69ef07c50bcdc\" class=\"collapseomatic_content \">\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"Website\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Website\" target=\"_blank\">Website<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Tim Berners-Lee\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tim_Berners-Lee\" target=\"_blank\">Tim Berners-Lee<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"World-Wide-Web First Website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/History\/19921103-hypertext\/hypertext\/WWW\/TheProject.html\" target=\"_blank\">World-Wide-Web First Website<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"First Ever Registered Domain\" href=\"http:\/\/symbolics.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">First Ever Registered Domain<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"World Wide Web\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/World_Wide_Web\" target=\"_blank\">World Wide Web<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Image Source for First Ever Web Server\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:First_Web_Server.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">Image Source for First Ever Web Server<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"NeXT Computer\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/NeXT_Computer\" target=\"_blank\">NeXT Computer<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Tim Berners-Lee FAQ\" href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/People\/Berners-Lee\/FAQ.html\" target=\"_blank\">Tim Berners-Lee FAQ<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"The website of the world's first ever web server\" href=\"http:\/\/info.cern.ch\/\" target=\"_blank\">The website of the world&#8217;s first ever web server<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Source for Tim Berner's Lee Proposal\" href=\"http:\/\/info.cern.ch\/Proposal.html\" target=\"_blank\">Image source for Tim Berners-Lee&#8217;s Proposal<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Full Proposal by Tim Berners-Lee\" href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/History\/1989\/proposal.html\" target=\"_blank\">Full Proposal by Tim Berners-Lee<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Al Gore Invented the Internet\" href=\"http:\/\/www.snopes.com\/quotes\/internet.asp\" target=\"_blank\">Al Gore Invented the Internet<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Image source for original line-mode browser\" href=\"http:\/\/info.cern.ch\/LMBrowser.html\" target=\"_blank\">Image source for Original Line-Mode Browser<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Image source for original web browser\" href=\"http:\/\/info.cern.ch\/NextBrowser.html\" target=\"_blank\">Image source for Original Web Browser<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><a href='http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com' title='Interesting Facts'>Today I found out<\/a> what the first website ever made was.\u00a0 Simply put, it was a website made by the World Wide Web&#8217;s creator Tim Berners-Lee, who was working for CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The first ever website was published on August 6, 1991 and served up a page explaining the World Wide Web project and giving information [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1470,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[357,221,320,225,356],"class_list":["post-1458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-today-i-found-out","category-history","tag-computer-science","tag-history-2","tag-internet","tag-origins","tag-website"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40576,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions\/40576"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}