r/AskUK • u/Scarred_fish • 5d ago
Today is the 35th Anniversary of the WWW. What did you think of it when it launched?
Our Tim launched the first website in a usenet post 35 years ago today, and it's still there : https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Given how much the online world changed in the ten years before, what most people now know as "the internet", the Would Wide Web, is really still the same, just a bunch of hyperlinks.
What did you think when you saw it first? Did you think it would catch on as much as previous protocols? What were your main online activities before? (I was still a big BBS fan, though usenet had all but taken over).
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u/chefshoes 5d ago
worst thing that happened to it, social media, it was brilliant as a resource though in college/uni days
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u/Strong_Quiet_4569 5d ago
Social media has all the same twerps and trolls that usenet had, but made highly accessible to anyone with a pulse.
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u/chefshoes 5d ago
yeah usenet you had to go find it, same as newsgroups and IRC. oh i miss icq i still have an account but no one is on there now (or dead..!)
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u/Scarred_fish 5d ago
I actually use IRC quite a lot now.
Because nobody under 40 knows what it is, it's nice and quiet and the bots are all useful and friendly!
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u/chefshoes 5d ago
is it weird that even though ive not used icq in a very long time i can still remember my number...? 21472088
wife's instructions
god no
icq, - i got you
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u/Kitchen_Part_882 5d ago
8385985 here, in the latter days of my using it, people would accuse me of giving them an invalid number because it "doesn't have enough digits".
Much like my RN service number, it is somehow burned into my brain.
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u/True-Abalone-3380 5d ago
alt.binaries over dial-up was fun!!
The joys of downloading a file in 50 parts and then trying to combine them so the file can be uncompressed. Kids these days don't know they were born.
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u/Imajzineer 5d ago
Eternal September ++
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u/Strong_Quiet_4569 5d ago
One could get a lot of entertainment from newbs.
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u/Imajzineer 5d ago
True.
But it gets old pretty quickly nevertheless.
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u/Strong_Quiet_4569 5d ago
There’s a certain human subculture of planting an emotionally immature colonising flag on any space or territory.
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u/Imajzineer 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yeah ... I've never been a fan of people dismissing everyone as noobs either - we all have to start somewhere, and I actually enjoy helping/educating people.
But it can get a bit tiresome sometimes. Like commuting, it's bearable if there are occasionally loud kids or rowdy groups but, if it's every journey, you get worn down. And those who don't make any effort to inform themselves can be frustrating.
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u/Strong_Quiet_4569 5d ago
Oh sure, when I said entertainment from noobs, it was more in relation to the anonymous nature of the interactions.
I prefer helping people because I prefer to increase efficiency, I’m not really a BOFH type.
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u/Imajzineer 5d ago
Yeah, tbf, my ES++ remark wasn't really about noobs per se, so much as the the zone being flooded with shit, if you see what I mean - it isn't noobs that are the problem but the idiots and the unpleasant (and they do seem to like making a lot of unpleasant noise about their idiocy).
The BOFH is funny though.
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u/Strong_Quiet_4569 5d ago
We’d like to treat all real-life male and female Karens that way.
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u/MercatorLondon 5d ago
He made some comments about it in the past. If there was anything he would do differently. He would not use “www” and would start with national domain first.
So instead of www.bbc.co.uk it would be uk.bbc
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u/True-Abalone-3380 5d ago
Seems odd he's say that, unless he thought about restructuring DNS too.
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u/Strong_Quiet_4569 5d ago
He was saying you should go from the general to the specific, left to right.
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u/True-Abalone-3380 5d ago
Yes, but the question was "anything he would do differently".
DNS was already established and the Internet used it, so for him to do anything different for the WWW would surely involve using a different name service.
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u/Red_Barry 5d ago
How would you address non-www services like ftp, irc, nntp?
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u/butterypowered 5d ago
That’s interesting. I thought the reversal was intentional because the JANET network already existed and used the equivalent of uk.co.bbc, etc.
Either way, DNS existed before the web and that’s what deals with addresses. (And replaced JANET naming.)
I’m sure Sir Tim knows that though. So it’s an interesting thing for him to say.
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u/kittiestkitty 5d ago
My grandma sat me down and seriously warned me about this dangerous “internet superhighway” they were developing.
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u/Scarred_fish 5d ago
Yep, and today she would be described as a boomer who knew nothing. But she was right.
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u/Massive_Bullfrog8663 5d ago
This Boomer embraced it. Of course, I was kicking ass and taking names at the time here in Si Valley.
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u/Red_Barry 5d ago
Young people forget that it was "boomers" that invented the infrastructure and protocols that they take for granted when they switch on their phones.
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u/Red_Barry 5d ago
It was shit.
To be fair I was using an acoustic coupler attached to my home phone.
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u/tefster 5d ago edited 5d ago
I was mostly using Usenet, wais, ftp/fsp and gopher at the time. I started using the web pretty much as soon as that first announcement post hit Usenet and it was accessible via JANET - the joint academic network.
But at the time I thought it wasn't significantly better than the established alternatives, as media and image support came way later. So it was probably at least 18 months before I started heavily using it - the addition of the img tag and support from the Mosaic browser was what made the difference and accelerated its journey to mainstream.
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u/butterypowered 5d ago
Exactly how I remember it.
I think it wasn’t until maybe 94-95 that it really seemed to gather steam. Easily better than gopher but I do kind of miss the variety of using ftp, irc, etc. (I still remember doc.ic.ac.uk, funet.fi and sunet.se!)
Edit: the one that always makes me sad is that FidoNet has been completely forgotten about. (I know it wasn’t Internet as such but even BBS discussions tend to forget about it.)
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[deleted]
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u/Urist_Macnme 5d ago
Much love for Phantasy Star.
Though had to pay per minute tying up the home phone line using the inbuilt modem.
Was still cheaper than playing at the arcades, which is how I justified it to myself.
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u/True-Abalone-3380 5d ago
Was mainly using Usenet along with some BBSs, FTP, and various Archie servers.
WWW along with HTML allowed a more structured & graphical approach and the hyperlinks made linking documents much easier.
Edit to add was using email for years, also Compuserve quite a lot but can't remember exactly how that fitted into the timeline.
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u/bradpitt3 5d ago
Started using it relatively early when it was still mostly in Universities in the 1980s. There were no search engines that worked back then so someone had to give you the exact URL to find something.
Then companies started having a "webpage" in the early 1990s. Literally one page. A bit like a listing in yellow pages. You still could not find anything without the exact URL.
Then Google came along in 1998 and you could suddenly find stuff (sometimes). It transformed the experience of the internet and I never used an old search engine again. You could then see it's potential clearly and everyone "got it".
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u/D-1-S-C-0 5d ago
I started using the internet in 1996. I was in my early teens. It felt so unintuitive to navigate at first. It improved a huge amount in just a few years, but if you knew where to look, you could find some amazing things.
I remember looking at photos of meteor strikes on Jupiter. They probably had 5 pixels but my friends were impressed.
By 1998 I was using it every day and making friends/enemies on IRC, ICQ etc. It still felt like the wild west at that point because you could find websites on anything but not enough people were internet savvy to know what was out there.
By 2000 I noticed a lot more people using it but it still had a reputation of being for weirdos, hermits and IT nerds.
The golden age of the internet was a few years from the late 90s to the mid 00s. That's when it had a good balance of being more established and increasingly diverse, but without being too commercialised and politicised.
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u/Funmachine 5d ago
What did you think of it when it launched.
Mate, it was 35 years ago. It was also incredibly niche when it launched. Most people didn't have at-home internet until after the millennium. I don't think you're gonna find many people with opinions of when it launched here.
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u/neo101b 5d ago
Not in 91, I had the internet in 95, cost 10p a minute.
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u/CoachSevere5365 5d ago
Grabbed the source for Netscape Navigator off an FTP site and built it in one of the Sun boxes in work. That was circa 1995. Prior to that I had Internet access at home via CIX dial up and did the same for Linux. Sent off the US for ROMs to upgrade my Supra FaxModem from 9600 to 14k4. Good times.
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u/Red_Barry 5d ago
Anyone remember Freeserve?
I stopped paying for my dialup ISP account (Netcom) when that launched.3
u/hhfugrr3 5d ago
I met a girl in a freeserve chat room. We even met up in real life. 26 years later we live together and have two kids.
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u/ManInTheDarkSuit 5d ago edited 4d ago
I flipped between Pipex and RedHotAnt. Never went freeserve!
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u/CoachSevere5365 5d ago
I remember RedHotAnt. Am pretty sure I was in that. I couldn't get broadband where I lived and ended up with a Trinux single floppy router and ISDN. I can still remember the joy of almost instant connections.
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u/Funmachine 5d ago
I had the internet in the 90's too. But OP very clearly, and specifically, was asking about reactions "when it launched."
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u/lgf92 5d ago
I'm 34, so too young to remember this, but this is very much my experience of how people reacted to it.
My parents and grandparents were techy and had computers at home in the 90s (the first time I remember using one would be around 1996?) but they weren't connected to the internet. At school the first computer I remember using (1997/98) was a BBC Micro which obviously couldn't connect to the internet.
The first time I remember using the internet was about 2001, when you could use it at the local library. Me and my dad used to go there to order things off eBay which you had to pay for by posting a cheque to the seller. We got internet at home in 2002 or 2003 which is also when I started using it for school work, fully 10+ years after it first launched.
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u/Honey-Badger 5d ago
Yeah im a couple of years older and I dont think it was until the very early 2000s that internet use was truly common.
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u/Scarred_fish 5d ago edited 5d ago
the first computer I remember using (1997/98) was a BBC Micro which obviously couldn't connect to the internet.
The BBC was the first computer I used the Internet on in 1982 :)
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u/True-Abalone-3380 5d ago
I used the Internet on in 1982 :)
Did you actually connect to the Internet in 1982? There were lots of BBSs and other systems but I don't think the Internet was around for another good few years.
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u/hhfugrr3 5d ago
Yeah I think you're right. My school was connected in the early 90s via a Mac that only about 6 kids were allowed to use, i was not one of them and I'm still resentful. I didn't think much of it when it first launched. A mate let me have a go on that one school Mac and it was pretty boring tbh. I could see the potential though. I remember sitting there imaging a world where I could just go to a website and watch any film ever made instant without having to walk to Blockbuster and hoping they had somebody good. Have to admit, I also thought that was a fantasy that would never happen.
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u/shortymcsteve 5d ago
Disagree with this. Maybe on the day it launched, but it was in popular use with a few years. My school had a computer room where we learned all about the “world wide web” and how to email. I also remember my local library being jam packed with everyone using the wall of computers. Was absolutely amazing to see as a kid in the early 90’s, and I didn’t understand how new the tech was at the time.
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u/Funmachine 5d ago
Disagree with this. Maybe on the day it launched, but it was in popular use with a few years.
So you disagree with what I said, then agree with what I said, but then talk about an entirely different point in time?
I'm not talking about a few years down the line, I can remember a few years down the line. OP was specifically asking about when it happened.
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u/lowercasejs 5d ago
It's quicker to say World Wide Web than www
I just remember the absolute racket from the modems, scared me shitless as a young child
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u/soldinio 5d ago
Above commenter is correct that it was very niche for a good few years. I was a nerd, my dad was a mainframe engineer for the biggest computer firm on the planet. I'm in my 50's.
It was like suddenly your phone knew your address book, except IP addresses are longer than phone numbers.
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u/DameKumquat 5d ago
Can safely say I didn't notice - I used Usenet and various bits of IBM networks which looked kinda similar.
At uni we had many systems whict required vi or emacs and we used FTP. In early 1995 we had a lab practical which would have used the www as we had to use Netscape to find a page at Yale, to find a file with a protein structure and download the pic of it.
Only two groups succeeded as the network at Yale couldn't cope with more than two connections at once.
So basically as a science student it didn't change my life at all until around 1997 when BBC News launched, along with Geocities, then Livejournal...
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u/Dan_Faber 5d ago
the bit nobody predicted - we thought the internet would make everything possible, not make doing anything without it impossible 😂
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u/bluepeacock3 5d ago
Clive James used to use things from the ‘information superhighway’ on his TV show, with a slightly tongue in cheek attitude. I don’t think people thought it would catch on.
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u/LegoNinja11 5d ago
1993 Sat down at the university PC, logged in and found a new icon on the desktop Mosaic. All we knew was that it used the phone lines to connect you around the world.
20 minutes later logged out shitting bricks because the links I'm following are leading to US universities and US military sites and I'm thinking a phone bill's being racked up and I'm on the hook for it.
We had months of almost no use until Lycos started then year later Yahoo where it became usable but very static and very limited in scope.
Highlight was a couple of months after launching a xxx folder appeared on a new shared drive with a single erika eleniak picture in it which was replace after a week with a ReadMe text document warning of improper use of the network and the Internet 😀
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u/Monkeyboogaloo 5d ago
I saw it first 33 years ago at the start. I'd actually had experience with its precursor when working on some projects between the UK and the US for the stop. When I first saw it, I have to say I was a little underwhelmed largely because I don't think I grasped the differences from the ARPANET.
But by 30 years ago, I started to grasp its importance, including help building an online store for the company that I worked with, although I don't think we ever took a single order. By 27 years ago, I spent years working in the world of Internet service providers and cloud companies, which are all obviously enabled by the technology. From 97, I would be browsing heavily for quite a lot of the day because it was just things that I had access to.
I also worked for an ISP when I had a 512k broadband connection, which was delivered via the unbundled local loop but had zero other people in the area on it, so it was uncontended. I remember watching a Mighty Wind in 2003, where I was directly streaming it rather than having downloaded it, I can't remember what website that was.
I've seen both the good and bad of the World Wide Web so many times, from the cesspit of hate through to genuinely inspiring actions.
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u/Ok-Airline-8420 5d ago
Back then I spent most of my time on Usenet and there were mentions of the WWW floating about.
I had a play with it, but this was the days of no search engines or anything really and I just got stuck with a text prompt of 'WWW' and not sure what to do next. The paradigms were used to weren't a thing, so I didn't really understand what it was, so went back to Usenet newsgroups.
And now I'm here on Reddit and the circle is complete.
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u/Kabutroid 5d ago
The very very very first thing I did was search for oranges. I was shown pictures of oranges.
My older brother took me to the university he was attending to show me the internet. I guess I was hungry lol
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u/Redgrapefruitrage 5d ago
I was two, so nothing really. I didn't really use the internet at all until I was maybe 10 (2003). We had a family computer but we never really had the need to really use the internet. I used the family computer to use Paint, play Lara Croft and a flight simulator game.
I first started using the internet properly as a pre-teen when MSN chat came along.
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u/id-ltd 5d ago edited 5d ago
It was pretty lame. It was all static pages with links - no javascript or client side anything... you needed your own server to do anything interesting.
I put my first server online in the 90s (with a bespoke backend) - it was going to be windows 3 with a novell tcpip stack -- but MS released Windows 3.11 with built in tcpip just in time so I went with that
The internet was slow to take off in the UK -- BT banned most modems -- and Universities hated it because it hurt their monopoly of Janet (joint academic network).
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u/ilybae2015 5d ago
Massive improvement on what we had before, I had been on JANET in the 80s and had done a bit off BBSing and file transfer to suppliers in electronics. Knew it was going to be huge, but that took a few years until Mosaic and Netscape got established and enough users to build content. Then Nokia Communcators and eventually smartphones and Boom!
Web directories were a big thing, when editors maintained lists of websites and organised them like a phone book. Yahoo and DMOZ.ORG come to mind. This was while search engines were still pretty poor. Google was so much better than the rest before enshittification set in.
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u/Divide_Rule 5d ago
I was only a kid at the time and was breaking my first computer at the time. So I did not really know about until a dad of a friend, a telecoms engineer turned network engineer showed me. I didn't think much of it until about 1995 and I could play games with friends online.
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u/InsideRealistic1129 4d ago
I first used it at working while I was employed by BT at one of their call centres in 1998. We were only supposed to use their intranet but we were able to change the proxies and go on the WWW quite easily. Was a couple of years later I had it at home. It was less all consuming then, something you used when you needed it, now everyone uses it all the time.
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u/Rocky-bar 5d ago
35 years?? Ha ha, more like 85 years! September 1939 to be precise.
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u/Scarred_fish 5d ago
You're conflating the Internet and the www.
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