back when i first joined mastodon, one of the many surprising things i learned was that gopher had made a return to the public sphere after decades of obscurity.

i grew up with gopher and archie and veronica and many other www-alt protocols before getting hooked on the world wide web. they taught me how to hunt for things, in a time when web search didn't exist yet.

i've spent every day of the past week adding a new feature to kiki that i'm incredibly proud of, after hearing from several folks - namely @tomjennings and @scott, who (like me) are hungry for an information-dense and cruft-free internet

this works by turning your kiki pages into gopherspace pages through some formatting magic and textmunging. so now, you can host your kiki instance on both the www and in gopherspace, simultaneously.

it will be released in an upcoming version of kiki, available soon here: https://tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki

#kiki #worldWideWeb #GopherProtocol #gopherspace #indieWeb #smolWeb

PrivacyPlease - automate your #online #privacy with this #opensource #browser extension.

https://github.com/DoingFedTime/PrivacyPlease

#worldwideweb

Anyone else really pleased that the W3C Link Checker site is still alive and kicking?

https://validator.w3.org/checklink

(Unlike half of the small company webpages my site was linking to, which Link Checker has just pointed out are now dead ends.)

#WebDev #HTML #WorldWideWeb

Esta semana que la #worldwideweb cumple 30 años, retomamos este texto:

Cambiar #Internet desde lo sencillo, desde lo pequeño.

#DerechosDigitalesColectivos

https://sursiendo.org/2024/07/cambiar-internet-desde-lo-sencillo-desde-lo-pequeno/

@w3c

"the basic line-mode client"

That's how I discovered the World Wide Web: www on CERNVM, the IBM ES/9000-900 behemoth.

https://info.cern.ch/
https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
https://line-mode.cern.ch/
https://cerncourier.com/a/computing-at-cern-the-mainframe-era/

#CERN #WWW #WorldWideWeb #W3 #Hypertext #HTML #HTTP #IBM #ES9000

30.04.1993 - World Wide Web wird zur allgemeinen Nutzung weltweit freigegeben

Im Nachhinein kann man sagen: Das war der Durchbruch des Internets. Das World Wide Web (WWW) ist ein Netz aus Informations- und Kommunikationsservern und für die meisten Menschen der Inbegriff des Internets. Das Internet selbst dagegen ist sehr viel älter und diente ursprünglich vor allem militärischen Zwecken.

🔊 https://www1.wdr.de/radio/wdr5/sendungen/zeitzeichen/world-wide-web-100.html

#geschichte #www #web #worldwideweb #internet #netzwerk #kommunikation #it

i can't stop laughing at the thought of someone seeing #kiki's NCSA Mosaic/Netscape 1.x theme in 2025 and wondering if the entire world wide web was entirely grey in 1994.
(it was)

if this doesn't do violence to the idea of software preservation, i don't know what could

#worldWideWeb #netscape

for the past few years, i'm sure many of you have read my many lamentations about the death of the old, small web many of us grew up with.

there are tons of static site generators out there, but none of them did what i wanted: something that could build an entire site without futzing with javascript and library dependencies. i wanted something that we would have had in 2005, but didn't have in 2025.

in january, i decided to do something about it instead of whining. i started gluing together a few php scripts i had been using to build blogs, rss feeds and mini homepages. i even wrote a new mini markup language.

i thought it would take me a week. it took >3 months. 😅

it ran for the past month as globaltalk.network's interactive site, and many of you asked if i'd ever let other people spin up an instance. i can finally say: yes!

today, kiki is officially finished and released for public use. named after my little black house demon, it's small, fast, and sometimes well behaved. and, it's all written in php without a single external dependency. just unzip and go.

it's released as shareware - in the oldest, finest, jankiest meaning of the word: you're free to goof around with and share the unregistered version. build your own little kiki instance, and customize the heck out of it until it feels like your own little home in the world wide web:

http://tomodashi.com/kiki

#kiki #homepage #worldWideWeb #smolWeb #smallWeb #php

the best time to launch a 3d vrml chat world was 1995

the second best time is today

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

#worldWideWeb #smallWeb #smolWeb

today’s absolutely mission critical acquisition: a cisco 2500 AS2511-RJ router/access server, which will be turned into a dial-up isp with a pile of 14.4k-33.6k external modems

circa 1995

#retroComputing #worldWideWeb

If more people had some good sense, they would use country extension domain names.

But everyone wants that cool domain, for example, random dot social, as opposed to random dot ch.

Corporate America, governed under Us Law, is going to have a lot more oversight on the Internet, and many of you are not paying attention.

#Internet #WorldWideWeb #Oversight #DomainName #Domain #DomainRegistration #Register #Website

#TodayInHistory 1995 – WikiWikiWeb, the world's first #wiki and part of the Portland Pattern Repository, is made public by Ward Cunningham.

"Wiki" is a Hawaiian language word for "quick". Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, so he initially thought about calling it "QuickWeb", but later changed his mind and dubbed it "WikiWikiWeb".

#worldwideweb

Pictured Ward Cunningham

back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

#softwarePreservation #webPreservation #win31 #worldWideWeb #yeg #bbs #alberta

🎶. Welcome to the Internet
Have a look around. 🎶 🤣

Yes, back before search engines, truly took off, there was indeed a "Yellow Pages" (phone book) for the Internet.

#Internet #WorldWideWeb #Welcome

On 12 March it was the anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee.

Did you know that Tim Berners-Lee 🇬🇧 is an English computer scientist and that the internet (as we know it) was created in Geneva, Switzerland? 🇨🇭

He also created the HTML language, the URL system and the HTTP protocol.

So, when you type a website address (URL) into your address bar in your browser like this:

http://www

you're actually using Sir Tim's work.

Curiously, he later regretted using the initial pair of slashes '//' on the address though - it was a design choice hated by a lot people. (Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8306631.stm)
#worldwideweb #internet #technology #european

Has the World Wide Web turned the world better or worse? 🤔

»#GeoCities, known throughout most of 1995 as #BeverlyHillsInternet, was one of the first commercial internet services to make it easy for people to #publish a #homepage on the #WorldWideWeb.« https://cybercultural.com/p/geocities-1995/?eicker.news #tech #media

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉 𝑶𝒇 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑾𝒆𝒃

https://garry.net/posts/the-death-of-the-web

#tech #technology #BigTech #internet #WorldWideWeb #web #history #future #capitalism #commercial #enshittification #1990s #apps

Fuck the what Google's ReCAPTCHA is now a paid service?

Okay, time to migrate. Which other CAPTCHA services you know are free?

BTW: Planning to kill ReCaptcha package for Laravel, ask Google to bring their own.

#Google #ReCAPTCHA #CAPTCHA #Robots #Bots #WebDevelopment #SoftwareDevelopment #WebDev #Internet #Web #WorldWideWeb #WWW #Bot #Programming #appdevelopment