Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: Web birth dates
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2002 17:08:57 -0400
------ Forwarded Message From: Robert Cailliau <robert.cailliau () cern ch> Date: Sat, 11 May 2002 09:32:22 -1000 To: David Farber <dave () farber net> I'm sorry to have found this message so late, my reply is also late. Time to get some myths out of the way: The best reference to date for the history of the Internet and the Web is the book http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-286207-3 and in German at http://www.dpunkt.de/buecher/3-89864-108-2.html My name is on it almost by accident (Oxford University Press wanted it that way), but James Gillies is the person who did all the research and discovered quite a number of myths and onversights. I'm sure there are still inaccuracies in that book too, and it is also not complete. The first web server went on line in December 1990. There is of course no exact date for this, because we gradually came to a state in which the thing worked. It was somewhere towards the end of December that we felt it was sufficiently stable that it could be called "working". During 1991, a number of servers in institutes in Europe installed web servers. Then there are two other "important" dates: 12 December 1991 when the first server in the USA came on line (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). See http://www-project.slac.stanford.edu/webanniv/ April 1993, when I succeeded in convincing CERN to put the software library in the public domain. That was only necessary to convince the Americans that they could actually use the library software to build browsers. I guess it's a long, forever uphill struggle to convince Americans that they have not necessarily invented everything. Sigh. Robert Cailliau Web Communications & Public Education | Treasurer IW3C2 Education & Technology Transfer Division | IW3C2 C E R N | POBox 12, CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research | CH - 1211 Geneve 23 CH - 1211 Geneve 23 | http://www.cern.ch/ | http://www.iw3c2.org/ tel: +41 22 76 75005 personal: http://www.cern.ch/CERN/Divisions/ETT/WPE/People/RobertCailliau/
Maybe you two should try to reply to this (Dave Farber's widely read IP list). David -----Original Message----- From: owner-ip-sub-1 () admin listbox com [mailto:owner-ip-sub-1 () admin listbox com]On Behalf Of David Farber Sent: Wednesday, 09 January, 2002 18:15 To: ip-sub-1 () majordomo pobox com Subject: IP: Web birth datesDate: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 11:41:52 -0500 To: David Farber <dave () farber net> From: Ari Schwartz <ari () cdt org> Subject: Web birth dates Hi Dave, Interesting that this should come up. A calendar of the great dates of computer, freedom and privacy should be arriving this week in the mail to past attendees of the CFP conference to promote CFP2002 -- http://www.cfp2002.org Diana Peterson, a Georgetown graduate student, did extensive research to help us put this together. We could not find an exact day for the first Web page. The closest we came was in Tim Berners-Lee's book "Weaving the Web" which says that: "The WorldWideWeb browser/editor was working on my machine and Robert's, communicating over the Internet with the info.cern.ch server by Christmas Day 1990." Tim then discribes the effort to put the CERN phone book up in HTML. Since this was not very precise, we decided that the date we would use in the CFP2002 calendar was April 30, 1993 -- "CERN makes WWW free of charge." Anyone who has not attended CFP or is not on the CFP mailing list can request a calendar for free (while they last) simply by sending me their mailing address. Hope this helps. Ari ------------------------------------ Ari Schwartz Associate Director Center for Democracy and Technology 1634 I Street NW, Suite 1100 Washington, DC 20006 202 637 9800 fax 202 637 0968 ari () cdt org http://www.cdt.org ------------------------------------Delivered-To: ip-sub-1-outgoing () admin listbox com Delivered-To: ip-sub-1 () majordomo pobox com X-Sender: farber@127.0.0.1 Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2002 11:01:00 -0500 To: ip-sub-1 () majordomo pobox com From: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: IP: from an IPer Sender: owner-ip-sub-1 () admin listbox com Reply-To: farber () cis upenn edu "Do you know if Dec. 13th was any kind of Web-related anniversary? I was told that the first Web page was posted on 12/13/1991, but haven't been able to confirm. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated." For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/--For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- IP: Web birth dates Dave Farber (May 11)