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The Internet

What's the Oldest Web Page? 19

Posted by Cliff from the internet-history dept.
baconrecorder asks: "Yet another useless question among others that sometimes cross my mind wasting brain cycles. Is it possible to find out and certify what is the oldest web page still online, i.e. static web page whose corresponding file has the oldest absolute creation date (or,more stringently, the oldest absolute modify date) on the hosting server? For all the web philologists out there."
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What's the Oldest Web Page? More

What's the Oldest Web Page?

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  • Oldest web page (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The first web page was info.cern.ch [info.cern.ch] or nxoc01.cern.ch, this was the page maintained by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, It ran on Tim's Next computer and was served by the first web server also writen by Tim on his Next computer.

  • Well... (Score:3)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @02:54AM (#323557)
    Why don't you ask Tim?

    He's still alive.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Well, it's a tie between any one of the hundreds of webpages I've seen that were Last Modified: 12:00am January 1, 1970

    -"Zow"

  • I know that this isn't terribly helpful, but I actually found this out a few months ago. The bummer is that I can't find it again. It was a page affiliated with Tim Berners-Lee [w3.org] or the W3C [w3.org]. (Or was it on CERN's site [web.cern.ch]?) But it was the #1, very first, no-question-about-it page on the web. It exists. It's out there. Anybody know where?

    -Waldo

  • Sorry guys, NSCA Mosaic was not the first Web browser. It wasn't even the first GUI Web browser. Instead, that honor goes to WorldWideWeb.app [w3.org] on NeXTSTEP.

    Therefore, the oldest Web pages may still exist on Tim Berners-Lee's old NeXT cube, but it's not on the Web anymore. Thinking back to the first Web page you saw doesn't help you find the oldest page still on the Web, unless it's still available.

  • It wouldn't be the W3C or any of their pages. It would probably something at CERN. I wish for the life of me I could remember the DNS name for the server at CERN people used to telnet to, in the beginning, to use the WWW. That command line browser was interesting (no I'm not refering to Lynx): the links had numbers next to them, and you had to remember the number of the link you wanted to follow until you paged through to the end of the document and could then enter the link number.

    I was really happy when Mosaic and Lynx became available to me.

  • Hmmm, according to this Microsoft Press book in front of me the WWW was a brilliant personal innovation of Bill Gates. The first WWW page was written in the superior MS-Help format and apparently the idea was pirated by people at Netscape, whoe degraded everything into HTML. The whole thing would have resulted in everyone have "Really great software, for a really great price" if the government hadn't come along and passed laws forbidding innovation. The long term plan was to make all web pages in MS Word format which would have resulted in tremendous ease of use and increase productivity and security for all!

  • Mosaic WAS NOT the first WWW browser. Mosaic was the WWW browser that got the whole WWW revolution started. The first WWW browser I recall using was a command line thing at CERN. You had to telnet there to use it.

    There is a FAQ [boutell.com] that might shed some light on the subject.

  • I don't know why this bothers me, but I'm really sure that Mosaic wasn't the first browser. Arguably it was the first one that mattered to a lot of people. I've found lots of web pages that say Mosaic was the first browser and even one page that claims Lynx was [bville.com], but they surely were not, so I've gathered some evidence to prove my point.

  • At Mr. Berners-Lee's homepage [w3.org] there is an FAQ [w3.org] that includes some Examples of early WWW hypertext [w3.org]. It would appear to be from 1990 or 1991. That's about as early as it gets I would think!

  • ....that nobody moderaded up the right answer. The right answer is info.cern.ch [info.cern.ch] which was , at the time, Tim Berners-Lee NeXT Cube machine. It is, at least, the oldest www site ever.

    On Tim's book "Weaving the Web" which I believe was featured here on Slashdot, Tim answers that particular question.

    (And I just can't believe how many think the web was a NCSA invention)
  • Some of the error messages at www.win.tue.nl/errors/ [win.tue.nl] date from June, 1993.

    We weren't exactly the first site on the Web. Try http://www.w3.org/History/ [w3.org].

  • This is the oldest file on my web site.

    -rw-r--r-- 1 nelson root 35867 Jul 31 1994 packet_driver.html [crynwr.com]
  • Well, the guys at cern (in Geneva, Switzerland) invented the whole thing (and not NCSA), so it should lurk somewhere there.. go search for it !

    Aarno
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • www.w3c.org or a *.mil page or something... I think it'd be difficult to determine because there'd be no listing on major web indexes based on dates to my knowledge. I'd bank on it being an edu or gov related site.

    its not this one [antioffline.com]
  • I assume the oldest known webpage would be somewhere on the same server as NCSA Mosaic, since Mosaic was the first web browser.
    -
    Gangis M. Khan
    Unofficial Chrono Trigger 2 project
    http://www.uct2.net
  • The first web browser was NCSA Mosiac. it's early beta versions started with an "internal" web page, much like Netscape. So that's probably the oldest, however since it wasn't really "on the web" I would have to vote for either the NCSA home page [uiuc.edu] or the NCSA Mosiac for X/Windows page [uiuc.edu].

    P.S. I did actually work at the UIUC/NCSA during the development of Mosiac, but for the life of me I cannot remember what was the first page I saw, I just know it was a NCSA page.
    --
    He had come like a thief in the night,

  • Well, I don't know about the oldest ever, but Netsurfer Digest has a web page unchanged and online since June 3, 1994. It's the first beta issue of the e-zine:

    http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v00/nsd.94.06.03.html [netsurf.com]

    Can anybody come up with an older continuously served web page? Netsurfer would probably like to write about it <g>

    Incidentally some great 1994 stories in that one, echoes of the pre/proto-Net online world. For example a censorship crackdown on Italian BBSes and online advertising flamed to a crisp on USENET. Ahhh, the more things change, the more they stay the same!

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