Web 30: HTML

🌐 Learning HTML and publishing my first website in 1995

We are continuing our Web 30 series. If you haven’t already, I recommend you read the first issue in the series (below) before reading this week’s second installment.

When I started college, the web was just beginning to emerge.

If you don’t know the history, CERN has a short history of the web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while he was working at CERN.

1994

According to research at MIT at the time, there were only 623 websites at the beginning of 1994. By June this had increased to 2,738. By December 1994, there were 10,022.

Here was the first website in the world, which contained links to “information about the WWW project itself, including a description of hypertext, technical details for creating a Web server, and links to other Web servers as they became available.”¹

To provide some context, here are three highlights from 1994:

January

Yahoo! debuts as Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web

Stanford electrical engineering students David Filo and Jerry Yang created an online directory to house their lists of favorite websites. In March they renamed it Yahoo! because they liked the word’s use in Gulliver’s Travels, but they also created the backronym “Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle” to go along with the name. The URL officially changed in January of 1995. They edited the index to become an all-encompassing resource and used search engine partners as a backup if pages like “What’s New?” and “What’s Cool?” couldn’t suffice. Yahoo! diversified to a news page and an email provider after Google changed the internet, but eventually retired the original directory at the end of 2014.

March

Al Gore hypes the “information superhighway”

Former Vice President Al Gore, once known as an Atari Democrat because of his fascination with technology, long envisioned a way for Americans to access the internet. Congress passed “The Gore Bill” in 1991 to put $600 million towards computing advancement and education in the hopes of developing a National Information Infrastructure, which Gore coined as an “information superhighway” or “infobahn.” The term could be a nod to former Senator Al Gore Sr.’s support of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. He gave a keynote speech for communication industry leaders at The Superhighway Summit at UCLA in January 1994 and later made a notable speech at a tech summit in Buenos Aires that’s often referenced as “Al Gore Invents the Internet.” Whitehouse.gov was founded in 1994 to give the White House official presence online.

October

Founders of the Mosaic browser launch the even-better Netscape

Marc Andreessen co-developed Mosaic, the web’s first popular browser, in 1993 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (funded by The Gore Bill). He left NCSA to join James Clark in creating Mosaic Communications Corporation, later renamed Netscape Communications Corporation, in April. As their first product, they released the Mosaic Netscape 0.9 browser, which later had to be renamed to Netscape Navigator to avoid trademark violations with NCSA. Netscape Navigator took over three quarters of the browser market in four months and used cookies to enhance its service. When Internet Explorer and Mosaic purists threatened its dominance in the late ’90s, Netscape started work on Mozilla, or “Mosaic killer,” according to Fortune.

Go deeper

• 1994 in Tech: A Rabbit Hole into the World Wide Web (14 East)

• The State of Technology in 1994 (DKY)

• What the internet looked like in 1994, according to 15 webpages born that year (Fast Company)

• No Google. No Netflix. No iPhone. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1994 (Business Insider)

When I went to college, I didn’t have a computer of my own and, as a consequence, had to spend time in various computer labs. For my computer science work, I used two different labs. One was full of HP workstations that ran Unix. The other one was across campus and full of Macs. For my business courses, I used a computer lab in the basement of the business school that was all HP PCs running Windows.

Here is a picture I took of that building in the snow in February 1995.

© 1995 by Bryce Payne.

In the evenings, I would sometimes stay late after I finished whatever homework assignment I was working on and explore. Before long, I was experimenting with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and starting to create webpages.

1995

By February 1995, I would publish my first personal website. The Internet Wayback Machine wouldn’t be created for another year so sadly that first version has been lost to history.

I continued to add and build and refine the format. By April 1995, I had created a new design and added a “What’s New” page to highlight and log changes. That month I published Instructions for Life, a student’s guide to web resources, a list of web links and more.

By May 1995, I was developing a prototype for a new Computer Science department home page, which went live that year.

By September 1995, after a summer at home, I launched something I called AlumniNet^TM as a way “to develop some means of contact and continued communication with friends, classmates and others after high school.” This was nine years before Facebook was founded. Here is a snippet from the archived site:

Screenshot of AlumniNet^TM.

By October 1995, the home page of my personal website was in its third version and I had settled on calling it WebCentreBP. Here is a screen shot of the oldest archived version:

Screenshot of WebCentreBP.

There were no clear web design standards or best practices in those early days and it’s interesting to look back and see the user interface elements I incorporated even then:

• A top left site logo

• A left navigation pane

• A footer with navigational links and page information, including the last update date and contact information for the page owner

HTML 2.0 was finalized in 1995 and I continued to immerse myself in web development on top of my schoolwork, setting the stage for some notable firsts in 1996, which we’ll discuss next time.

I hope you are enjoying this look back at the early years of the web.

🎬W30C: 1994-2024

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which was founded by Tim Berners Lee in 1994 as the standards body, put together a retrospective of the first thirty years of the web in 2024 in the first 2 minutes and 24 seconds of this video which you may enjoy.

It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come.

🎵I’ll Remember by Madonna

As we look back, this week’s music embed is the theme to the movie With Honors, which came out in 1994 and I recall watching with a high school friend home from college, probably in 1995. I don’t recall it actually being in the movie but do recall it playing when the credits ran. Anyway, give it a listen.

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I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Be well,

-Bryce

1. Source: https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web.