The Cellar - May 19, 2009: First Server

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- - May 19, 2009: First Server (http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=20317)

May 19, 2009: First Server

This is it, the root of all evil... the reason your house is a mess, the dirty laundry piled high, and your car overdue for an oil change.
Sitting in a glass case in Switzerland, at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the European Council for Nuclear Research, is the world's first web server.

http://cellar.org/2009/server.jpg

Quote:

1990 was a momentous year in world events. In February, Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison. In April, the space shuttle Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. And in October, Germany was reunified.
Then at the end of 1990, a revolution took place that changed the way we live today.

Berners-Lee created a browser-editor with the goal of developing a tool to make the Web a creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext. What should they call this new browser: The Mine of Information? The Information Mesh? When they settled on a name in May 1990, it was the WorldWideWeb.

After this humble beginning the scourge spread, slower than swine flu, but with a larger impact, by orders of magnitude.

Quote:

During 1991 servers appeared in other institutions in Europe and in December 1991, the first server outside the continent was installed in the US at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). By November 1992, there were 26 servers in the world, and by October 1993 the figure had increased to over 200 known web servers. In February 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released the first version of Mosaic, which was to make the Web available to people using PCs and Apple Macintoshes.

... and the rest is Web history.

Of course during this development, the Cellar was patiently waiting for them to get their shit together, just so we could welcome YOU! :D

link

Al Gore's name was Berners-Lee in 1990?

He changed it, American voters were not ready for hyphenated names.

What's that object to the right of the keyboard, right behind the mouse? White, squarish thing, looks like it's got some kind of display on it.

That's the box that housed the Cellar monkey and his typewriter.

Wow! I forgot there were such things. Glad today's kids don't have to rely on such archaic things. I forgot, how did we play spider solitaire with books?:D

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZenGum (Post 566696)

What's that object to the right of the keyboard, right behind the mouse? White, squarish thing, looks like it's got some kind of display on it.

It's a portable, high-resolution, low-power information storage and retrieval device.

It may take some getting used to.

I actually remember the day one of our professors called me up at work and said, "I read an article about something called the World Wide Web in the New York Times... do you know anything about it?"

My 15 minutes of near fame. I worked at Spyglass in Champaign Illinois just after they licensed the Mosaic source from NCSA. It was an exciting time. The web was just starting to take off.

Then Spyglass licensed the source to Microsoft. Microsoft started giving their browser away, and the browser market disappeared.

Unless they've done a total rewrite on either of them, I have little bits of code in both IE and Outlook. (I also worked at CE software, who licensed the source for their calendar app to Microsoft. And the bottom dropped out of the calendar app market.)

Ahh, Spyglass... a name from the past.

My 15 seconds involved getting berated by Marc Andreessen on Usenet, for posting the location of an alpha version of Mosaic for MacOS that was supposed to be private.

Yeah. Some of the Spyglass people came from NCSA. They had stories to tell.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dar512 (Post 566731)

Unless they've done a total rewrite on either of them, I have little bits of code in both IE and Outlook.

I know it's not all your fault, but, can we blame you?:firefox:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gravdigr (Post 566876)

I know it's not all your fault, but, can we blame you?:firefox:

All the code I wrote was creative, well-crafted, finely engineered, and bullet-proof. In short, yeah go ahead. :D

Damm, who would have thought we would ever see a picture of Al Gore's desk.