I don't understand folks who say that the #internet and the open #web was a mistake. It has done exactly what they were meant to do: to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world, in order to accelerate knowledge discovery and innovation (which we see today; I can barely keep up with the papers being published). It just needs to be continuously improved. #webhistory

1) The world’s first internet cafe opened in London, England in 1994. Nearly 30 years later, Rest of World visits the few that remain and explores the history of web connectivity in Uganda, Nepal, Nigeria, Argentina, Mexico, and Hong Kong

https://restofworld.org/2023/internet-cafes/

#Retro #Internet #InternetHistory #CyberCafe #WebHistory

Enjoying seeing all these #dh updates. Any recommendations for where a #histodon who's a complete DH novice can get started teaching themselves? Main interests right now are scraping author info (especially nationality and place of work) from archives of two journals, and also just #webhistory in general

@histodons

Excellent archeological analysis by Miriam Suzanne @mia:

> All browsers add an 8px margin on the body element – it’s part of the W3C-recommended default stylesheet [..]
> But why 8px? Where does that come from?

https://www.miriamsuzanne.com/2022/07/04/body-margin-8px/

#webdev #css #webhistory #w3c

Mentioned working on this awhile back: Humanities Washington just published a short primer I wrote on early queer BBSes, particularly ones within Washington State (there's more info on all of these boards available at the QDHP): https://www.humanities.org/blog/love-acceptance-and-screeching-modems/

Also, if anyone was active on any of these boards, please reach out! I'd love to talk to you.

#lgbtq #queer #queerhistory #BBS #pride #webhistory

Given the recent news about YouTube account deletion, I've started a public spreadsheet to collect links to tech/internet-related videos to download and save: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BApiBHo63Muxa567gcb0IewNHZPQT4UIJ26vzOKR1Hw/edit?usp=drivesdk

There's so much important historical ephemera - ads, edutainment, training videos, etc - that was never formally saved but can be found on YT.

My current plan is to slowly collect download videos and upload them to the Internet Archive.

(@admin1, would you consider boosting this?)

#webhistory #preservation

Happy 30th Birthday, www !

"...On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. CERN made the next release available with an open licence, as a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. Through these actions, making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish..."

#onthisday, #www, #webhistory, #CERN, #mediahistory, #worldwideweb, #Europe...

https://home.cern/news/news/computing/twenty-years-free-open-web

As a web historian, color me far from shocked: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23691156/imgur-porn-ban-sexually-explicit-content-terms-of-service.

#webhistory #imgur #meme

Did you know that the first website ever created is still live today? It was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 and was dedicated to information about the World Wide Web. 🌐💻

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

#webdevelopment #funfact #webhistory #timbernerslee #worldwideweb #internet #webdesign #webtech #webdev #programming #coding #html #css #javascript #frontend #backend #webdeveloper #webprogramming #webapp #tech

I randomly was curious today why the slash slash was added after the colon in HTTP and what it meant. Most other protocols just start their stuff after the colon.

Apparently Tim Berners-Lee later thought of // as a design mistake and said it does not signify anything.

#InternetHistory #WebHistory #RetroComputing

https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-regrets-one-small-thing/

#TimeTravel today :: Adobe #GoLive 9 launch on 😘 macOS High Sierra
#computinghistory #webhistory #wysiwygwebediting with #AdobeGoLive

15th January, 2001. Twenty two years ago today, the first @Wikipedia page edit was made, and the world was irrevocably changed. [[WikiWiki]] #wikipedia #knowledge #webhistory #web

@lampjaded @corbden

Random story.

In the early days of the web I had a web design company and we did a travelogue of a trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro, with daily updates.

The folks on the trip would take photos, out them into a web page template along with the written parts, and send them back to the home office, where we’d post them.

The tricky part was the “send them”.

They’d save them to a floppy as a zip file. And someone would run down the mountain and drive the floppy 100 miles to the nearest FidoNet node. They’d be loaded onto the node and sent from FidoNet to the nearest internet gateway. FidoNet messages were very limited in size. So they’d uuencode the zip file, and then split it into 50 or so files, and ship it off as 50 email messages. Of course, they didn’t arrive in order, so I had a script that would sort them all out, reassemble them, decode the result, unzip that, and post it to the site.

It felt about as fragile as when they updated Voyager from halfway across the solar system to send higher resolution images.

#saga #webhistory

Resilient Web Design, by Jeremy Keith @adactio.

Great history book on some of the lesser well known phases we went through to get where we are, and what (I hope) we learned from it in terms of principles.

"""
Even if you made a mistake, the browser’s implementation of Postel’s Law ensured that you’d still get a result. Surprisingly, there was an attempt to remove this superpower [..]
"""

https://resilientwebdesign.com/chapter4/

#historylesson #HTML #WebHistory #webdev #PWA

Some videos I watched last week:

The Queer Erasure of #Asexuality (A Discussion) – by James Somerton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a4DTkoejG8)

Why Japanese websites look distinctly different from the rest of the world – by Answer in Progress #webdesign #webhistory (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ)

Anyone interested in contributing an overview of the history of Mastond, fediverse, and its predecessor? Sounds very timely...
#WebHistory #TWC2023 #thewebconf
https://www2023.thewebconf.org/calls/special-tracks/history-web/

CSS timeline :
https://css-timeline.vercel.app/

#CSS #HTML #webHistory

Looking forward to hosting
Richard Rogers (University of Amsterdam / Digital Methods Initiative) for a talk on "Machinic critique: Web epistemological approaches in contemporary historical perspective", 1st December 4-5.30pm. ✨

Details & registration here:
https://machinic-critique.eventbrite.co.uk

#digitalmethods #algorithmstudies #commodon #mediastudies #internetstudies #newmedia #platformstudies #socialmedia #webhistory #digitalhumanities #dh #digitalculture

RT @MIT_CSAIL
#otd in 1991 Tim Berners-Lee first posted on an online newsgroup about a project he was working on called "The World Wide Web."

https://w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6487.txt

#WebHistory #tdih #TodayInHistory @timberners_lee

I don't know why, but I was thinking about the ecosystem of free hosting stuff that was on the web back when I was first getting into coding. Subdomain hosting like cjb.net and c4.to were popular. Seems both are gone now. There was also free image hosting, and a site that had scripted The Gimp to generate text into an image in a fancy way. #webhistory