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Tim Berners-Lee


It was August 6, 1991, at a CERN facility in the Swiss Alps, when 36-year-old physicist Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website. It was, not surprisingly, a pretty basic one ? according to CERN:


This is the First Ever Web Page. Not very exciting.


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


Full Article can be found here.


http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/08/world-wide-web-20-years/


DulwichFox

I think that's quite impressive :)


Nothing to do with the internet, but I can remember when to run just one statistical test you had to go to the computer lab, hand in at least one box of punched cards, wait a day or so, go back, and be handed sheets of perforated paper mostly containing the words "error" "error" "error".


Then you had to go through all the cards containing the actual code (rather than the data), and try to find out which one/s contained the error.


And hope to God you didn't drop the box and mix all the cards up.


If you were lucky, after a few visits of this kind you actually got to find out the results of the test.


Those were the days, eh :) I expect these days you just do it in one click, though probably there are more sophisticated tests now.


Oh, and the computer took up a whole room and had special computer technicians to run the tests on it :))


It was the Kolmogorov?Smirnov test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov%E2%80%93Smirnov_test- my memory can't be as bad as I thought :)

numbers Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Sorry to be dim but how could the first ever web

> page have a 'Frequently Asked Questions' section?


Well.


Hypertext (the language which webpages are written in) existed years before the web. And it itself sprang from an ancestor (SGML, or standardised general markup language) that dated back even earlier, and was used to build electronic documents. The difference was that, before the web, computers exchanged information by other protocols (e.g. disk, FTP, gopher) though that didn't mean there weren't search engines (e.g. veronica). It just meant there weren't any browser wars. In other words, FAQs, disclaimers, error pages and naughty pictures all existed long before the web.


Berners-Lee's invention was to combine the two things - tweaking the connections between networked computers so they could transmit hypertext directly. It seems a simple and obvious idea and, so Berners-Lee wasn't the only only contender. A whole host of academic, military and legal organisations were trying to do much the same, though with different agendas. Happily, Berners-Lee happened to work at CERN and know the right people, and that, thankfully, is why it didn't go all VHS on us. If it had, we'd still be floundering in walled gardens and having to pay hefty fees just to look at stuff. Although, thanks to Apple, those options are still available, at least we have the choice.

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