The oldest page on the internet.

[codeblew]

What's up all. My mind was wandering today as it often does. I decided to find the oldest page on the internet. I thought I'd share what I found, and perhaps be proven wrong. The first website (as in www not ftp, telnet ect...) on the internet was info.cern.ch. The first webpage was TheProject.html. This webpage was authored by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. The original website is no longer online, but I was able to find an archive at w3.org. At this point I ran into a problem. The file TheProject.html had been edited/updated as many webpages are and the oldest version available is from 1992. I was able to find another page that Tim must have made around the same time to demonstrate how links work. This page was last modified Nov 13, 1990. I believe this to be the oldest page on the internet.

Here's the link http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Link.html

Originally this page would have been located at this URL http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Link.html

Can you find a page on the internet that is older than this Link.html file?

[westfw]

So are you requiring HTML formatting, or just accessibility via something other than ftp/etc? In the early days, it was pretty common for there to be non-html pages accessible via the http or (more likely, probably) html that was accessed via ftp...

(I missed the early years of the web. I took a look at one of the very early browsers, decided it was just an easier interface to ftp/etc, that I didn't need (since I already knew how to use ftp.) A year or so later, it was like ... Whoa!)

(The internet has a good memory, though. Find the earliest thing still around from ME, here:
http://groups.google.com/group/fa.info- ... 8&oe=utf-8
Ah, PDP-10 assembler. Those were the days!)

[codeblew]

I was thinking the html with http delivery combination. At first thought 1990 doesn't seem that long ago to me. I guess that would be 18 years though. Am I getting old?

That's just fantastic westfw! Your link is to a newsgroup posting right? I had no idea that google groups had that large/historical of an archive. Westfw's post is dated May 15 1981! I used to have a TRS-80 in 1984 and I remember the cartoon computer in the manual I read to learn microsoft's new BASIC. I was 8 years old and it was the first book I read from cover to cover. Thus began my life as a geek.

[westfw]

I usually put the birth of "the internet as we know it now" in about 1995. After all, Windows 95 was pretty much the first consumer operating system that included TCP/IP networking support without needing the user to jump through a bunch of hoops (somewhat fewer hoops with Macs, but still not the sort of thing that got done outside of universities, early-adopter industry, and cluefull hackers.) The Internet itself (ARPANet converted from "NCP" to TCP/IP) happened (officially) 1/1/83, so the internet has existed about the same amount of time before and since "consumers" (huh!)

(and yeah; Google acquired the usenet "News" archives (back as far as 1981, anyway) from whoever had been keeping them before that (I think the actual data came from Henry Spencer at University of Toronto.) There was apparently lot of stuff from significant mailing lists (Human-nets being one that is often mentioned) that pre-usenet or ARPANet-only and was "lost"... Sigh. Significant (ARPANet-policy-violating) mailing list traffic probably started about 1978 or so. It was the release of "Star Trek - The Motion Picture" (DEC 1979) that caused the "digest" to be invented; the traffic on the sf-lovers mailing list was bringing banned and other sites to their knees. Alas, my own (very partial) archives from pre-1981 are on 9-track magtape that is all but unreadable.)

And yes, I'm definitely feeling a bit old.

[eil]

So are you requiring HTML formatting, or just accessibility via something other than ftp/etc? In the early days, it was pretty common for there to be non-html pages accessible via the http or (more likely, probably) html that was accessed via ftp...

(I missed the early years of the web. I took a look at one of the very early browsers, decided it was just an easier interface to ftp/etc, that I didn't need (since I already knew how to use ftp.) A year or so later, it was like ... Whoa!)

(The internet has a good memory, though. Find the earliest thing still around from ME, here:
http://groups.google.com/group/fa.info- ... 8&oe=utf-8
Ah, PDP-10 assembler. Those were the days!)

Goodness, almost 30 years of using the same alias! That's quite an achievement. Although it just dawned on me that I've been "eil" for about 12 years now. I know some people who don't keep the same username/login/nick/alias for more than a month.

Also, I didn't know there was FTP in 1981.

Your message is only 4 days older than the oldest usenet message archived by Google.

[westfw]

Goodness, almost 30 years of using the same alias!

Actually, not. That was a "standard format" username in college, that I didn't like very much, and I was "billw" "everywhere" (work and guest accounts) after that, until the free email accounts came along. "billw" is rather popular, has significant meanings (I used to get really confused by the "I am a friend of BillW" bumper stickers), and I didn't manage to snap it up on any of the "public" systems. So I revived "westfw", which behaves pretty well search-wise and ISN'T popular...

FTP and Telnet predate TCP/IP by a long ways; having been the original ARPANet apps. According to the index of RFCs (rfc-index.txt, many places...) the first efforts were in 1971. (I did not encounter the net till 1977.) MAIL was originally layered on top of FTP, until it became obvious that it was important enough to need its own protocol.

Your message is only 4 days older than the oldest usenet message archived by Google.

I was active enough in those days that I doubt a week went by without me sending a message that would end up on SOME usenet group, so you're just seeing the cutoff date of the archive...