On 7 Jul 98, Suzanne wrote:
> I saw this question on another list today, and wondered what you great
> historians have to say about it:
> Subject: *SW* building websites since 1991
> I came across a competitor today who claims to have been building
> websites since 1991....my history is not that good....is this
> possible?....janet
I would say that the correspondent's competitor has been smoking some interesting
herbs, by the sounds of it.
The Web, such as it was, was a purely experimental premise back in 1991,
accessible to a selected audience of proto-nerds through a crude line-mode
browser that ran on VAX, Next and RS6000 machines. Andreessen's "Mosaic for X"
alpha wasn't released until 1993, at which time there were only about 50 known
HTTP servers in the world. As of mid-1991 there was only *one* server in the US,
at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California. It held the contents of an
existing database of abstracts of physics papers. Even Gopher didn't catch on until
1992.
So anyone claiming to have been "creating Web sites" in 1991 is, erm, running
rather fast and loose with the truth, methinks. At best they may have been
involved in the very early experimental days of the Web, placing text files on
European servers for the perusal of a handful of other pioneers. But these were
hardly "Web sites" as we understand them today.
I first tinkered around on the Web early in 1994, telneting into a Lynx session via a
local BBS, and even by then the Web was mighty rudimentary -- mostly reams of
techie text stuff with the occasional image (which I had to download and view
later, of course.) I later graduated to the Cello browser with a SLIP connection,
and then Netscape 0.97 late in '94. Seems like a very long time ago now :)
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Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Town of Almonte: http://www.almonte.com/
Business Web site: http://www.almonte.com/brent/
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