missed anniversary

[Brian Ellis]

Two days ago, 12 November, was the 20th anniversary of an important event which has affected us all, the foundation of the World Wide Web. I cannot think of anything which has developed so much in just 20 years.

[VJ]

I remember sitting in the PC room of the university, in my first year (1994), using a Mosaic browser on a monochrome X-terminal (huge CRT)...

[KRSESQ]

My first exposure came in 1985 or thereabouts when my nephew showed me how he could use his Commodore 64 to dial into the local bbs and download shared apps. I recall thinking "this could be big."

Wasn't the World Wide Web as such, I know...

Kevin

[Fat Tone]

I cannot think of anything which has developed so much in just 20 years.

My gut?

[Evildead666]

I remember sitting in the PC room of the university, in my first year (1994), using a Mosaic browser on a monochrome X-terminal (huge CRT)...

Dammit, Mosaic, that was it

I was in first year Uni also in 1994, at UMIST, and first discovered the WWW there in the maths computer labs. (One of the only places where there were computers, but no people ).

Interestingly enough, there were some interesting web pages, Clive Barker had his webpage already back then iirc. Web of Souls or something. (Still going).
I remember nearly all the pics were unsightly GIFs in 256 colours as well.
I don't think JPEG had been invented or used yet back then.

I also remember the days before porn was available on the Internet lol.
Good old Altavista.
Don't even think I got an Anti-Virus until 1999/2000 either. or even later (Came home to 33Kbps Dial-Up from a 10Mbit link, sad days).

[Kruzin]

Back in '84 I spent a weekend at my late Uncle's place. He was a proffessor at University of Michigan.
Up in his attic, he had rows of computers, and an accustic 300 baud modem his phone handset sat on.
He dialed into the university and played text adventure games.
It was AWESOME

He turned me on to computers, and most of the music I listen to.
Unfortunatly killed in a motorcycle accident just a couple years later.
My son is his namesake....

[High_Jumbllama]

I remeber getting hired for a lab assistant job and one of the first questions I was asked was about the internet. Didn't have a clue. (1996)

[Brian Ellis]

1993: wrote first webpage in HTML as .txt under MS-DOS hosted by CompuServe: limited to a single page, no graphics, 10 kB. Implemented e-mail, also under CompuServe. Mosaic browser.

1994: CompuServe limits improved to 3 pages, simple graphics, 25 kB: Netscape launched, based on Mosaic.

1995: Vermeer FrontPage (later bought by Microsoft): first WYSIWYG page design (remained with FrontPage until a couple of years ago when Expression Web 1.0 was launched)

1996: new ISP with pair.com, 10 whole megabytes of hosting space! Also dedicated domain name for the company: the real start for the Internet in its modern form. Kept CompuServe running for a couple of years for continuity. Some of my websites are still hosted with pair.com which is an excellent ISP.

These were my pioneer Internet days but it should be mentioned that I I had been using computers and programming since 1970s. In the early days, I had great difficulty persuading companies with whom I worked to implement e-mail (exception: CERN!). I would say that the great majority of them did not do so until about 1995.

God! Things have moved over the last 20 years and I would put the Internet as the great number one invention of the time. Thanks, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!

[VJ]

Back in '84 I spent a weekend at my late Uncle's place. He was a proffessor at University of Michigan.
Up in his attic, he had rows of computers, and an accustic 300 baud modem his phone handset sat on.
He dialed into the university and played text adventure games.
It was AWESOME

He turned me on to computers, and most of the music I listen to.
Unfortunatly killed in a motorcycle accident just a couple years later.
My son is his namesake....

My first experience with a computer was at a friends place. His father worked for Summagraphics, and at home he always had a very up to date computer. It must have been early eighties, high end computer for that time (amber screen), and we played games such as Sopwith, Tetris, Mach 3 (it had digitized sound through the speaker!) and later California games... At times he also had thermal transfer A4 printers, A0 plotters and even A0 cutters at home...