This brings back memories.  Many many years ago in what seems like another lifetime, I was the head of the UNIX administration team at FERMILAB. We had I believe the 3rd website in the United States. Life was much simpler then - web browsers such as they were only showed text. Links were new and exotic. I remember one day Tim Berners-Lee was visiting the lab from CERN and we had a talk about a lot of different things, one of which was this new World Wide Web thing he was working on.  I told him I was not at all sure that it could get any traction - he didn't seem too sure either, but he had the vision to have faith and I did not. This is probably why he is now Sir Tim Berners-Lee. And I am here in Downsville running a little website. 

Anyway - CERN has recently released some of the old tools from that era, including a simulation of the original CERN WordWideWeb browser (which was originally written on a NeXT computer - lovely little beasts). You might enjoy taking a look to see what life was like back then. It's fun to see how modern web sites work (or not) when browsed in a browser that doesn't understand most HTML tags and has no concept of CSS. Take a gander at it here and have fun. A quick hint -- You want Document -> Open from Full Document Reference in the menu at the top left - then type in the URL of interest. 

The picture here is what Wis.Community looks like in the CERN WorldWideWeb browser.

Steve Hanson
About

Steve is a web designer and recently retired from running the hosting and development company Cruiskeen Consulting LLC. Eye On Dunn County is now published by Eye On Dunn County LLC, and publication of this site continues after his retirement.

Steve is a member of LION Publishers , the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, the Menomonie Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Local Media Consortium, is active in Health Dunn Right, and is vice-president of the League of Women Voters of the Greater Chippewa Valley

News Article Type

Memberships

Support local news with a membership!

News Section

Add new comment

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.