The data may remain somewhere but could be so difficult to locate that most people would simply resign themselves to a kind of perpetual digital amnesia. Not long after that, the list’s maintainer threw in the towel – the web’s exponential growth meant that no archivist could hope to keep pace with it. But by the end of February 1994, more sites went onto that list every day than I could find time to explore.
I’d surfed the entire web.įor a few months, I managed to keep up with the list of new websites as they popped up on the NCSA list, priding myself on staying current with this amazing new technology. NCSA’s list had a lot of overlap with the list at CERN, but a few new sites would pop up on the bottom of the list every day, so I spent another day or two visiting all the sites on that list that I hadn’t already visited. Almost as famous as CERN, NCSA gave the world the first widely used browser, Mosaic. By the time I’d finished that list, another list had appeared, this one hosted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications or NCSA. I worked my way down that list, methodically clicking on link after link, exploring the website that loaded into my “browser”, and going on to the next.
In the beginning was the list: just a page of names and links to websites, sitting on the CERN website – the first website, and the birthplace of the web. First among my friends – and among the first few thousand web users anywhere in the world – I explored a tiny universe of content.īut how did web surfers find anything before search engines such as Google – a tool that came along several years later? Twenty-eight years ago this month, I got onto the world wide web.
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