25 years on the WWW
In July of 1996 I attended orientation at UMD and got my account on the wam.umd.edu
system. A few weeks later I was able to telnet in and put up my first rudimentary
web page. I had done some simple web-pages at work in 1995, but this was the
first time I had a hosted web-page all of my own.
The 3d-text images were made with
"Iris Showcase" on an SGI Indigo2.
A lot of the little icons scattered around the front page are inside
jokes that you might have had to had been there in 1996 to appreciate.
Hopefully in 2026 I'll still be around to put up a "30 years on the WWW" page, although
who knows what form the internet will have by then.
To put things in perspective,
in 1996 it wasn't even that certain that WWW would fare any better than gopher did.
The September that never ended (which has since ended) was still young. You used telnet,
not ssh. There was no significant amount of spam e-mail.
Slashdot was simply the "news" section of Rob Malda's college web-page.
7 digit ICQ numbers were still available,
and almost no one used AOL's IM. A 133MHz pentium was considered speedy, and Windows 95
was considered a great new OS (unless like me you were running the just released Linux 2.0).
The earliest wayback machine capture of the website can be found
here
So here's hoping this site will be around to see its next anniversary...
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