October 21, 2004

• Look it even captured us once upon a time. Forever immortalized in history.
• Check out the advertisement on the IMDB site. Heh.
• They just mention suck in passing, but they don't have to link to it thanks to Carl.
• Yegods, I wish there was a way to wipe the old incarnations of my sites off the face of the earth for good.
• Don't forget Google in 1997, searching 25 millions pages, thanks to their massive storage capacity ! (via daviduf.net) Do you remember it from that far back ? When did you star using google, my fellow simians ?
• s/star/start
• anybody know the absolute, positive, very VERY first web site? or is it impossible to know that?
• Wow, killer Google logo. I don't remember it at all in '97; I must have started using it a little in 1998 and then in full force around 1999. Of course, I *do* remember Google circa 1960. (I'm sure I must have gotten that from MeFi or BoingBoing so I'm sure you must have seen it too.)
• That was kinda my thought process leading up to this post SideDish. I was also looking for an archive of defunct web sites.
• sideD: positively sure.
• wow, richer, that's the very first one? how cool is that. 1992. whaddya know. thanks!
• Alternatively, also from W3 (of course), is the least recently modified web page - last changed on Tuesday November 13, 1990, at 3:17pm GMT. That via this little history of teh intarweb.
• I had the pleasure of interviewing Quentin Stafford-Fraser, co-inventor of the coffe pot webcam, last year. It's a nice little glimpse of the early days, when people were pioneering stuff without any idea that they were being pioneers. Here's a (large, unedited) snippet, for those who unreasonably enjoy this kind of stuff: "Actually, the coffee pot cam started before the web. And in many ways, it was good indication of why the web is good. We started with this little application which put a picture of the coffee pot, which was just icon-sized, in the corner of everyone’s screen. And it was dependent on our own network protocols, and software that only ran on one platform, and so to see it you had to not only be running my little program, but also our variation of the drivers for operating system as well. But fortunately, because we were all using this for our own experiments, all the machines had them… and so there we probably fifteen of us who all ran this special program which put the picture of the pot in the corner of the screen, and it only refreshed three times a minute, but... it was actually very useful! In a way, it’s a good example of how it’s important to have things just there, easily and intuitively available – if you just glance at the corner of the screen, there’s a picture of the coffee pot. It was just a visual indication of how likely it was, if you were to go downstairs, that there’d be something even approaching fresh coffee waiting for you; or at least if it was going to be your job to refill the thing… But when the web came along – first of all it was just text, and the first web browsers only showed text; sometimes they would allow you to use different fonts! But then they started allowing you to put images in, and people immediately started inserting pictures of their girlfriends, or sketches of what their circuit diagram did, or whatever. And we realised fairly early on what not many people had realised before, that when your browser asks the server for the image, it doesn’t have to give back the same image every time – it can be dynamically generated in some way. Now people had done this with text before, but images are more complex to dynamically generate. And so we though, “where have we got a source of these constantly changing images?...” And then we thought, “Aha… the coffee pot…"... " cont...
• "...And so we basically… um… My friend Dan Gordon, who basically deserves most of the credit for this, but, uh, prefers to let me handle the publicity, he took my little program and modified it so that it would put out these images in a format that the web browsers would understand. And then, instead of having to have our software and our platform and my little program to view this thing, all you needed was a web browser, and you could see the coffee pot. Of course, it wasn’t there all the time, unless you always had a little window open and got it to refresh again and again, but it was really easy to do from any machine. And as a little side-effect of this, we happened to make the images available to anyone in the world… We weren’t thinking at the time that this would be of any interest to anyone – but that was the effect! Especially back in those days, when there were very few firewalls or anything on the web, there were probably only twenty web servers in the world, maybe a few more – and they weren’t much to look at, frankly. Very few had pictures. And so, the fact was there just wasn’t much else around. And at the time, video cameras were very expensive resources – we happened to have a few lying around from an old project – and to devote a whole video camera, and a video capture card, and in fact a whole computer to something as simple as watching what your coffee pot’s doing was just such a wacky idea that people thought, “Aha!… This is too wild an example of the crazy stuff people are doing with the web…” This was right back in the early days of the web, remember. And that’s it. It got started because, well, there wasn’t much else around, and it was quite unusual." Phew. That was longer than I thought. And it's only about 15% of the whole interview...
• Why does Monkeyfilter only have one archive visit stored there? That's ridiculous... most other sites seem to have 20 or 30 archive visits.
• Thanks, flash, I enjoyed that little bit of that.
• SideDish: According to this newsletter (PDF, see pages 6-8) Fermi National Accelerator Lab (fnal.gov) lays claim to being the "second or third" website online in the US as of 1992. They don't say what website was number one (or two) in this country, but they point out that the web was developed at CERN in Switzerland.