http://kottke.org/11/10/early-1990s-web-browsers: "I compiled a bunch of old browsers for download back in the day".

12.11.1990

http://twitter.com/adactio/statuses/20479033986 : "Reading emails from nineteen years ago today. http://tinyurl.com/3xhsh54"

http://twitter.com/adactio/statuses/20472111722 : "Well, I'll be! @timberners_lee proposed HTML5's outline algorithm for sections and headings 19 years ago. "

http://twitter.com/adactio/statuses/20470534348 : "The earliest document ever published on the web is *almost* valid HTML5"

"The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15 March - the 25th birthday of the day the first dotcom name was registered. In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in dotcom. That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon.<br />
It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth dotcom was registered."

"Beta version 0.10 of Mosaic, NCSA's X/Motif-based networked information systems browser, including full source code and binaries (for SunOS 4.x, SGI IRIX 4.x, AIX 3.2, and DEC Ultrix), is now at ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Web/xmosaic"

"Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything. ... Let's recap some ancient history here: Microsoft used to have IE for Solaris and even had a beta of IE for Linux. That was when IE was way behind Netscape and was trying to catch up. Once Netscape was safely vanquished, Microsoft's commitment to support IE on other platforms vanished. In fact, Microsoft intentionally pulled IE on other platforms, because it was clear to them that making the web experience suck on other platforms was a way to keep Windows firmly entrenched. I am glad they adopted that strategy, because that strategy eventually paved the way for Firefox (and Safari and Chrome ...), and together those browsers have rendered the operating system utterly irrelevant. Apple's resurgence - based on design prowess, not platform dominance - and Vista's failure, have demonstrated that convincingly"

"2009 is the 40th anniversary of the first computer network - the precursor of the internet - and the 20th anniversary of the brilliant idea that led to the creation of the world wide web. What exactly is the internet, and how does it differ from the world wide web? Who were its pioneers, and what technological surprises has it sprung? This album opens with a specially recorded interview with John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University and author of 'A brief history of the future - the origins of the internet'. He explores some of the key moments in the short but spectacular history of an extraordinary phenomenon, the people who made them happen, and some of the problems that have emerged. The album also features archive interviews with Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Donald Davies and other pioneers of the internet age, recorded in the late 1990s."

Lots of food for thought here ...

"Ideas around the formation of a web first began to gain traction when the desktop PC landed in the late 1980s, but it was Berners-Lee who focused on the notion of using the internet to share documents, according to Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at Southampton University, and founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative. "Tim pulled together ideas of a markup language, getting files on the internet and hypertext," she explained. "The things that made it work were open standards and protocols so anyone could set up their own web server and HTML documents, the fact that it was completely distributed and scalable, and that it worked over the network.""

"Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born. This week, it's a pleasure and an honour for us to welcome the Web's inventor back to CERN to mark this special anniversary at the place the Web was born." + http://www.webfoundation.org/2009/03/post-4.html, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/happy_20th_birthday_world_wide_web.php, http://www.broom.org/epic/ols-master.html

"because the prognosticators didn't foresee that the Net would be so simple and stupid, they couldn't foresee how everyone with a keyboard would pitch in. Sidney Fernback assumed a government would have to build a National Data Library. Daniel Bell assumed that because information is a collective good, no individual would have an incentive to build it out. They couldn't foresee the power of the market to build a Google, and they would have been flabbergasted by the way we all pitched in to build Wikipedia, or LibraryThing, or even to find the continuity errors in beloved films. The amount we've built together for free surpasses not only assumptions about technological predictions but many assumptions about human motivation and human nature. The fact that this book by remarkably insightful men — yes, all men — failed to predict the most important change computers would bring is a sign not of their failure but of the unpredictable transformative human power the Internet has unleashed."

+ http://dashes.com/anil/2008/09/a-pre-history-of-the-google-browser.html

"Vanity Fair set out to do something that has never been done: to compile an oral history, speaking with scores of people involved in every stage of the Internet’s development, from the 1950s onward."

"There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us - so seemingly obvious - that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here's a case in point - the weblog post's permalink"

"Public Domain document of 30 April 1993". See http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2003/PR04.03EWeb10Years.html

"Exactly 15 years ago the directors at the lab where the web was first developed signed a document which said the technology could be used by anyone free of charge. ... BBC News talks to some of the leading figures in the web community about their hopes"

"the second volume of Internet Power, the video tutorial series about the Internet from 1995. While the last episode focused on Entertainment, this one teaches you about Education -- museums, libraries, and other research tools"

"The second in my series of Internet Videos from the VHS Era"

"the first volume of a two-tape collection called "Internet Power!" from 1995"

"HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts. Authors: TBL Tim Berners-Lee CERN/CN ... History: 25 Sep 90 Written (TBL) with the help of the Interface builder"

fascinating stuff

"This 1994 publication should be in all cybergeek's library. It's an artifact of a time when the Internet first became publicly accessible. Trebor thinks of it as a search engine before one existed. I see it as a precursor of wikipedia."

"The website of the world's first-ever web server"

"A screen shot taken from a NeXT computer running Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb browser"

"Sir Tim Berners-Lee's original computer, the first host for the "World Wide Web," invented at CERN. "

"XML is ten years old today. It feels like yesterday, or a lifetime. I wrote this that year (1998). It’s really long."

"Blogs were a different kind of conversational before permalinks were invented. ... Permalinks & titles encourage us to face outward, to package our ideas in chunks for easy consumption by the reading machine (um, that's you)"

see http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/06/on_permalinks_and_paradigms/. "each post is a discrete object -- with its own link -- within the context *of* a page" - http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/06/on_permalinks_and_paradigms/#comment-1124

"The first video on YouTube, uploaded at 8:27PM on Saturday April 23rd, 2005. "

"What do we mean by the web of the mid 90's and when did it end?"

"how does the Web look now, when it’s no longer seen as the technology of the future, when it’s intertwined with our daily lives and filled by people who are not excited by the mere fact of its existence?"

"Not only will we remind you by telling what the web was like. Our main attraction is a timemachine that brings you back to any web era as defined by the browser version predominant at that time. For it is a browser emulator."

TfT is "an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. … You can't really guess where mind-amplifying technology is going unless you understand where it came from. "