#web-history — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #web-history, aggregated by home.social.
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RIP Ask Jeeves. The natural-language search engine founded in 1996 was rebranded as Ask in 2006, and officially shut down on May 1.
Here are the Wayback Machine’s first and last captures of the site.
When websites disappear, the historical record can disappear with them. The #WaybackMachine preserves that history – capturing the web so its past remains accessible.
Explore 30 years of web history: https://web.archive.org
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I was just reading a great piece on how the browser wars shaped the internet (https://hackernoon.com/how-the-browser-wars-changed-the-landscape-of-the-internet), and it hit me with a massive wave of nostalgia.
I had been using Opera since my school days. The classic Presto-engine Opera was truly ahead of its time. Does anyone else remember Opera Turbo, Opera Unite, Opera Link, and the original Speed Dial? The competitors had nothing even close to that back then. Yes, websites occasionally broke because of the different engine, but I absolutely loved that browser, even if I couldn't always explain why.
When the original Opera essentially ended with version 12.18, it was a sad moment. But the second I heard about @Vivaldi launching, I immediately jumped on their first Technical Previews. I was so relieved that the spirit of the old Opera didn't actually die - it just reformatted and got a new name.
I have followed them ever since, and lately, I've been using Vivaldi a lot more actively. I cannot recommend it enough.
It is incredibly convenient and customizable, exactly like the good old Opera. I am even planning to buy some of their merch to support the team and spread the word.If you are looking for an alternative, just give it a try. Even though it uses the same Chromium engine under the hood, the experience is infinitely better than Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
#VivaldiBrowser #Opera #BrowserWars #WebHistory #TechNostalgia #Fediverse #Blog #Thougts #History
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Sometimes it is fun to do a manual audit of internet history. I just visited http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and paused for a minute. It is literally the first website in the world.
The technical legacy of CERN is mind-blowing. They did not just smash particles! They gave us HTML, the WWW, and a strong culture of digital privacy. @protonprivacy for example, was founded by scientists who worked at CERN (it originally ran on protonmail.ch), and today it is one of the best tools we have to push back against Big Tech.
But then I got curious and went down a WHOIS rabbit hole. The registry shows cern.ch was registered "before 1 January 1996". However, the historically recognized first domain ever, symbolics.com, was registered on March 15, 1985.
I had a brief moment of cognitive dissonance: how could the first domain be six years older than the first website? Then it clicked. DNS and WWW are fundamentally different protocols. The DNS was already routing emails and networks long before Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks.
To take it a step further, the same Tim Berners-Lee did not just invent the Web - he went on to found the W3C to keep it open and standardized, a mission that still continues today.
First domain != first website. It is basic technical logic, but connecting the dots manually gives that satisfying feeling of closing a mental background process.
#WebHistory #CERN #DNS #W3C #TechPhilosophy #InternetHistory #Proton #InfoSec #TechAudit #Blog #Privacy #History #Fediverse
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🚫📚 Oh no, blocking the Internet Archive is like trying to stop a tsunami with a colander while AI chuckles in the background. Meanwhile, the web's historical record gasps its last breath as the #EFF throws a party for its 35th—with free "Mission Accomplished" hats for all! 🎉🤦♂️
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/blocking-internet-archive-wont-stop-ai-it-will-erase-webs-historical-record #InternetArchive #35thAnniversary #DigitalPreservation #AIImpact #WebHistory #HackerNews #ngated -
Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record
#HackerNews #BlockingInternetArchive #AI #Ethics #WebHistory #DigitalPreservation #InternetAccess
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**Blocking the Internet Archive Won't Stop AI — It Will Erase the Web's Historical Record**
#InternetArchive #AI #DigitalPreservation #WebHistory #Censorship -
I started my first personal homepage ("GrossWorld") with Angelfire in 1998-99. After a couple years, I moved my website to joshrenaud.com, and I changed my Angelfire site to (mostly) just a redirect. But I never killed it, and kept it online the past couple decades.
#digipres #retrocomputing #history #webhistory #archives -
Who remembers this website? My wife did not!
https://web.archive.org/web/20250704192401/http://blackpeopleloveus.com/
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Gizmodo: Opera Has Turned 30—and Is Celebrating With a Compelling Tribute to Web Nostalgia. “To celebrate the milestone, Opera is doing something brilliantly engaging: It’s put together a Web Rewind archive site that memorializes some of the best online moments and memes of the last three decades. From the classic modem dialing tone sounds, to MySpace and the top eight friends paradigm, […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/03/01/gizmodo-opera-has-turned-30-and-is-celebrating-with-a-compelling-tribute-to-web-nostalgia/ -
Librarian Jean Armour Polly and the origins of the phrase 'surfing the Internet'
(the title of the piece should say WOMAN, and there is some debate, but come on, it was her, the comic doesn't even say 'surfing').
https://www.surfertoday.com/surfing/the-woman-who-coined-the-expression-surfing-the-internet -
CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989
#HackerNews #CERN #originalbrowser #1989 #webhistory #technews #HackerNews
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Mike Little: the British co-founder of WordPress you’ve probably never heard of (but should)…
In the story of WordPress –the tool that powers 45% of the web, including 10s of 1000s of film sites– Mike Little is Steve Wozniak to Matt Mullenweg's Steve Jobs. Matt polished the interface, the marketing and curly quotes – while Mike added the blogroll, rebuilt the code, and added the one-click easy-upgrade that's been central to its success. But unlike Woz, Mike never had shares in Matt's $7bn business – or even a job there. He didn't know you could make a living from WordPress until he turned up at the first UK WordCamp. He hasn’t been knighted or hall-of-famed, and isn’t known outside of old WordPress developer circles. Is this because he’s a cheerful and easy-going northerner from Stockport? Because he didn’t have a degree? Because he’s black? I don’t know. All I know for sure, is this is someone who anyone in tech, or who uses WordPress, should know about. -
This is CogDogBlogged: "This [is/was] For Everyone"
I’m here for the first check mark for my effort of counter Tsundoku or reducing that pile on unfinished books. This is hardly a book report or detailed analysis, really I could just say, I’m done” and move on to the next.
As an eager web fan boy, I put my order in for Tim Berner-Lee’s book This is for Everyone. Given the web has been the arc of my career, and ow much I enjoy back stories and […]
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i love that bruce damer has kept his homepage for the Avatars! virtual worlds book online for 30 uninterrupted years.
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@grammargirl's interview with Doug Harper of etymonline.com is well worth a listen;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nswr96XGt7k
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl/
They talk briefly about the origins of the site. Where Harper mentions how much easier it was to establish a website as a landmark when the web was new, and how crowded the landscape has become since.
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So Vimeo is also going to close https://mastodon.social/@kottke/115979240241733454 which means that YouTube remains the only general public video platform on the web today among those born in the mid-2000s. I remember Blip.tv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blip.tv that closed in 2015, which had better features than YouTube and Vimeo at the time
https://cubicgarden.com/2015/01/22/blip-tv-does-good-on-its-promise-to-archive/
It allowed the use of Creative Commons licenses and the automatic cross-posting of videos to the Internet Archive.
#webhistory -
bleem!.com in october 2000 😎
for anyone who doesn't remember bleem: it was a very early PSX emulator that would let you play certain playstation games on your DreamCast or in Windows.
it got sued out of existence by sony a year later.
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On this day in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee released the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, laying the groundwork for the modern internet! 🚀 This innovation transformed how we access information and connect with one another. #WebHistory #Innovation #WorldWideWeb