When The Web Was New

Posted by harrisj Thu, 07 Apr 2005 05:05:00 GMT

Here's a flash from the past, courtesy of Technology Review. It's a reprinting of an article about the growing pains of the Web back in 1995. And what's especially funny to me is the screenshot of Mit's Homepage back in 1995. If you squint really closely, you can see the address of MIT's official server back then was web.mit.edu, because the domain www.mit.edu was actually the location of an earlier server set up by the esteemed Student Information Processing Board (SIPB). Originally running on Plexus, a PERL web server implementation, it was one of the first 100 web servers in the world.

Why do I mention this history? Well, back then I was a student at MIT and a prospective member of SIPB, and someone suggested I might want to get involved in being a webmaster. And so this has brought on a bit of a wave of nostalgia for those heady really early days when HTML tags were strictly semantic, a URL on a billboard seemed an insane novelty, and we edited pages on the server by hand in ed. Good times.

For more information, check out original 1996-era homepage or the exciting history of the original MIT web server.