The early years of the web are peppered with so many milestones it is difficult to know which ones to celebrate. Perhaps that is why the 10th anniversary of the first web site launch passed by so quietly in December 2000. The site, http://info.cern.ch, at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (Cern) in Geneva became a central point for information about the web in its earliest days.
Those original pages, along with the physical machine that ran the server, are long gone and even the page that replaced the site has been moved to a new location with a lengthier URL; http://cern.ch/WebOffice-Old/www0/Welcome.html.
After Cern, the world's second web server was established at another physics laboratory, the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). Like the info.cern.ch site, the original has been updated into oblivion, but a project to resurrect it is under way, described at http://cern.ch/WebOffice-Old/www0/Welcome.html.
There is something of the web's essence in this story. Constantly evolving and ephemeral in nature, its pages are caught up in a cycle of development, deployment and destruction. It is only more recently that we have begun to realise that bits of it might be worth preserving. The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 with this in mind, documenting the transition from the web's golden age of amateur supremacy into the commercial beast it has become.
Physically located in San Francisco, the archive contains more than 100 terabytes of information, including web sites, Usenet postings and FTP archives. Though free, you need to be pursuing formal research to gain access. Some specific collections are easier to gain entry to through partners of the Internet Archive, including the Smithsonian's index of US election sites from 1996. Compared with sites from the 2000 election campaign, the most obvious advances are in web design rather than policy matters. The most recent addition archives the web of September 11.
From the beginning, the way the web looked was governed as much by the tools we used to browse it as by the people who built it. For many early adopters, their first web access was using Lynx, a text-based browser that originally ran on Unix platforms. It is still available for its original platform as well as in Windows and Mac versions from www.trill-home.com/lynx.html.
When the first graphical browsers appeared, the textual origins of the web were reflected in simple page designs, neutral grey backgrounds and a frugal use of images - driven in part by the lack of formatting options available in early versions of HTML.
The emulator pages at www.dejavu.org are the easiest way to see how the web was, with working facsimiles of Mosaic (the first graphical browser), a beta version of the first Netscape Navigator and the universally derided Internet Explorer 2.0. These browsers didn't support exact positioning, frames, coloured tables, font tags, style sheets or any of the elements today's designers take for granted.
If you are particularly miffed at the tyranny of modern web design, stage your own personal protest and install an antique browser on your system. The Browser Archive at http://browsers.evolt.org maintains a collection of vintage browsers, including several incarnations of Mosaic, Navigator and Internet Explorer. You will find the original web browser - web inventor Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb for NeXT.
Despite the web's high turnover of sites, there are many pages that once built are abandoned: these are the very ones that seem to turn up just when you are scouring the net for the latest information on a topic.
When deliberately looking for ancient web pages, the advanced functions at www.hotbot.com come in handy, allowing you to set date parameters within which to conduct your search. Google is another good stop in your search for the old stuff, as it saves the content of defunct pages in a special cache that can be accessed from your search results.
The real gems are buried deep within the web's classic sites - so often steeped in the messy libertarian ideals of the early internet. In other words, places where nothing ever gets sorted or thrown away. Try the Electronic Frontier Foundation for documents about the early days of the web and net that are contemporary to the time, or trawl through user home pages at The Well.
Of most interest historically are book-length documents such as Brendan Kehoe's Zen and the Art of the Internet of 1992 and Adam Gaffin's '93 vintage Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet. Though both contain much useful information, the Lynx "screenshots" and step-by-step instructions on how to navigate a web page come from an era that seems much longer than a decade ago.
