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CERN recently re-installed the first web page made by Tim Berners-Lee back in the 1980s. Take some time to glimpse at a piece of incredible history, revived for a very different world:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

A look at the page source shows how sophisticated the web has become since then. No scripts, no metadata, no styles, no images, no frames. Those pages were purely just HTML and used only a few basic tags at that.

Only about 12 different tags exist and the entire source fits on a single page in Word

Compare it to the page source of this thread on KYM. There's more tags used in this page than letters on the worlds first webpage

Correction: 1990s. I remember when the www was brand new, and did a short research paper on Berners-Lee in the late '90s, so I remember it wasn't the '80s.

Here's a fun story that always makes me feel really old when I tell it these days: In the spring of 1994, I had a course in History of Mathematics with <a href = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Abraham">Professor Abraham, a nutty but genius hippie from whom I had previously taken Intro to Chaos Theory. On the first day of class, he informed us, "Instead of printing out the course syllabus, I'm putting it on a page on the WorldWideWeb." He pulled up a program on the overhead projector while we students all looked at each other in confusion. “So what you'll need to do is go to one of the computer labs on campus and open up a program called Mosaic and type H-T-T-P-colon-double-slash--” …At which point the room erupted with at least half the class (including myself) shouting something like, "Wait, what the fuck?!" We thought he had finally lost his mind.

Actually, for all I know, I may have been the only student in the class who knew the Internet existed (I doubt it was common knowledge among non-CS majors), but certainly none of us had heard of the Web, and any of us who had ever used the Internet probably did so through the use of some simple Unix commands and <a href = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)">Gopher protocol. Of course, even in the early days of the Web, not only was e-mail still text-only, but web pages all looked like the one linked to since there was no in-line displaying of images, active code scripts, or even fancy text formatting.

It's always weird to reflect on how far (<a href = "http://thedoghousediaries.com/1251">some) technology has advanced in less than 20 years. In 1994, the world had not yet seen: DVDs, the original PlayStation, cell phones with cameras (or even downloadable ringtones!), Starbucks Frappuccinos, Pokémon, or <a href = "https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/comic-sans">Comic Sans.

Remember:
This was the first picture on the internet (not kidding around here).

I should add that the worlds first website looked even uglier than the one you see in Fridges link

That website simply has the code of the worlds first website, not the design. Our modern browsers automatically apply some formatting to make it look prettier than it actually was

To really get the 1993 web experience, one must see the web through the eyes of the first browsers

Every website looked like this.

Every. Single. Website

What exactly is so ugly about it? I think it's got a nice sort of charm. That font looks like it was ripped straight from a 50s sci-fi flick.

This is actually pretty awesome. Thanks for allowing everyone to take a look at the internet's infancy, CERN. And keep on being awesome with the science, too.

What, Courier? It's nicer than Times New Roman, I guess, and I do like slab serif fonts (KYM? Hello <a href = "https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/538217">Caecilia!), but humanist sans-serifs just look so much cleaner for computer display purposes.

(Wait, this is Typeface General, isn't it?)

Horribles Cernettes… really horrible.

so bad dey make u cri

@0.999999999

What's ugly about it? Bland. Grey. Drab. Default. Lifeless. Basically just a Notepad document with absolutely no customization to reflect the personality of you or your business

And like I said: every website had to look like that. Back then you would have killed for the ability to add Comic Sans just to stray away from the limited technical appearance of HTML1.0

Since there is so much porn on the internet, I must ask. What was the first porno site ever created? Who was the first person to make it?

I think sex.com was the first registered pornsite and it was registered by Gary Kremen in 1994. If any pornsites came before it, they aren't on record.

Pornsites didn't show up until the mid 90's when browsers started supporting image formats. But note that they appeared as soon as browsers supported images

During the 80's, all you could have was ASCII boobs

If I'm not mistaken, it was www.yourmom.com, made by your mom.

Can we get back on topic and just be awed at the WORLDS FIRST WEBSITE?

In my browser it looks even more boring.

I apologize for spoiling your enjoyment of the thread.

And so does Don'tKickMeBro's mom.

And don't forget their big single: Collider

But IMO the woman with blue dress have pretty eyes.

Blue Screen (of Death) wrote:

To really get the 1993 web experience, one must see the web through the eyes of the first browsers

I was bored and wanted to see what the first website would look like on different browsers and different Operating systems. And now you guys can see how it was with these screenshots

Have the first website on different, old operating systems Win 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and Mac OS 9 (Classic)

I've also included images of KnowYourMeme homepage, you can see how well old browsers render the front page.

Installing old OS, using old browsers, with all the constant errors and crashing made me appreciate modern software a lot more. Took about 8-10hrs to get all the old OS and software to run again.

Old browsers can't load KYM properly and constantly crash. This was a rather painful experience

The most boring set of images you'll see this week:

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Unfortunately I was not able to Get Mac OS 7.6 to run. TCP/IP issues.

@Ivan

Fantastic experiment. I love how the old browsers just can't figure out KYM at all.

Modern websites have advanced so far, they use languages that must seem like a load of syntax errors to the early browsers

Of course, the ironic thing about that is that none of those operating systems existed when that webpage came out. Macs were on OS 7…

…and PCs were on Windows 3.1

Ah, I still remember my first post-college Internet experiences were Windows 3.1 running AOL 2.5 on a 32 MHz processor. Even without a modern basis for comparison, it was painfully slow.