The History of the Web

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The Web’s First (And Second) Browser

Published: September 25, 2017

The web’s first browser featured full color, read/write capabilities, and multiple windows. The second browser was a text-only command line tool. Guess which one people actually used?

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Why Do We Call it a Homepage?

Published: December 1, 2020

The word homepage came into popular use in the mid to late 90’s, but it’s origin dates back to the web’s beginning.

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What the Web Could Have Been

Published: April 18, 2017

Before the web, Gopher offered a way to connect to the Internet and share documents. And if things had gone a little differently, it might even be what we use to surf information today.

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The Importance of Being on Usenet

Published: July 17, 2017

Ever wondered how people found about the web. The first transmission of its existence was a digital one, a Usenet post that sparked a following of early web pioneers.

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A Brief History of Hypertext

Published: February 20, 2017

Without hypertext, there would be no World Wide Web. But its name and conception predate the web’s creation by decades.

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The First Website in the United States Was Made for Physicists

Published: January 21, 2020

Tim Berners-Lee has said, on multiple occasions, the the first website in the US was one of the major reasons the web took off. But what did it do and why was it so important?

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What Happens When You Enter a URL In Your Browser of Choice

Published: April 15, 2019

There’s this scene in the second season of The Crown (if you watch enough old movies, you’ll see the same kind […]

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The Origin of the IMG Tag

Published: March 7, 2017

Why is it the <img> tag instead of the <image> tag? The answer, it turns out, dates back to one of the web’s earliest browsers and one of the web’s earliest discussions.

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Before the Wars, Browsers Were Everywhere

Published: April 21, 2020

Before browsers were truly cross-platform, there was a time when each operating system had their browser of choice, and it was tailored to the needs of those users.

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How We Searched Before Search

Published: March 20, 2017

Believe it or not, there was a time before search engines. Discovery on the web was far more difficult. It was easy to get lost. That is, until a few different people created a map.

They Offered a Million Dollars to Surf The Web. Somebody Won.

Published: July 21, 2021

In 1995, it would be hard to believe that you could win a million dollars from surfing the web. Then, AOL made it possible.

A Fun List of Browsers You’ve Never Heard Of

Published: January 5, 2021

There are the browsers that everyone’s heard of. And then there are some that, for whatever reason, faded away. These are the latter.

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The History of the Web is a project by Jay Hoffmann. Get in touch.