History of the web
The media are abuzz about a new gallery at the National Media Museum in the UK which is opening today. The new exhibit is called Life Online, although they're also referring to it as LOL, probably to keep the kiddies happy.
I'm curious as to how accurate the exhibit is, because museums tend to embellish facts to keep things interesting. If they mention that the Internet was created for nuclear preparedness, I'd walk away. Since the focus is more “web” orientated, I'd probably be a bit disappointed if they didn't mention Gopher as an early iteration of the web.
I'd be really disappointed if they didn't at least mention Doug Engelbart's extraordinary demonstration from 1968, which showed groundbreaking stuff created by him and his team at SRI that we take for granted today (watch it if you haven't)..
It's a coincidence that this pops up in the news this week, because I've cleaning up some really old archives over the past few days. I'm a compulsive digital hoarder, and I have uncovered an unfortunate handful of server backups that were made during some server upgrades back in the day.
Amongst the tangle of forgotten ideas, dead projects, and user data, I rediscovered what the Alien Internet Services website looked like around 1997/1998:
It looks pretty dated now; especially the menu bar which was a side-effect of having a website built using frames and tables. At the time, Scott was heavily pushing accessibility and compatibility (far ahead of his time), and the site worked with browsers that didn't support frames.
It gets a lot worse, as this is what it looked like around 1995/1996:
I don't even know what to say. I'm grateful that not many people would have seen it, and fortunately things have changed quite a bit since then!
Ahh, Internet — we were both so young back then.
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