The First WWW Page

[Rogue Valley]

We live in a quite astounding era. Something akin to the analog-data era after a German blacksmith named Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and books became available to the masses. Data had acquired a robust permanence. Our era - The Digital Revolution - began in the waning decades of the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century and is now available to the masses. Desktops, laptops, notebooks, tablets, and digital cameras. Digital technology is today ubiquitous throughout the world. In cars, places of business, our homes, and via smartphones, smart HDTV, and smart watches. Better than the book, digital data is now available virtually everywhere and almost instantaneously.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee at CERN drafted a proposal that inaugurated the WWW. He described it as an attempt to bring structure to chaos. The problem Berners-Lee and his coworkers at CERN faced was one of too much information, and not enough efficient organization. Most of the tools necessary already existed - hypertext, the Internet, fonts, etc. They put it all together and the order that they imposed upon the information disorder is now known as the World Wide Web. This architecture was originally available on an open web of 57 servers. Today the WWW is a global touchstone.

Believe it or not, you can still visit the - very first web address - originated by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague's at CERN:

The World Wide Web project

 

[Lethargic Aptitude]

ANd here I thought the first one was porn.

 

[EnigmaO01]

Naah that was xxx.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

I wonder if it's still running on a NeXT.

 

[EnigmaO01]

About a third of the Internet bandwidth is porn. Someone wanted to do a study on porn in the U.S. and needed to find males under 30 As a control group that had not viewed porn as a control group. They were unable to find any. LOL

I'm writing a novel where an sphere controlled by an extraterrestrial artificial intelligence comes within a distance of the earth to intercept and upload the Internet to gain as much knowledge about us (would be a great way to do so without making contact) as it can. It is somewhat baffled by the amount of the bandwidth of pornography on the planet. :mrgreen:

 

[cpwill]

About a third of the Internet bandwidth is porn. Someone wanted to do a study on porn in the U.S. and needed to find males under 30 that had not viewed porn as a control group. They were unable to find any. LOL

I'm writing a novel where an extraterrestrial artificial intelligence comes within a distance of the earth to intercept and upload the Internet to gain as much knowledge about us (would be a great way to do so without making contact) as it can. It is somewhat baffled by the amount of bandwidth of pornography on the planet. :mrgreen:

"As near as we can tell, 85% of instructional material in the public education domain is dedicated to the mechanics of various forms of procreation, indicating a deep fear that instinct has degraded to the point where (we must assume) humans are no longer capable of reproducing without visual guides to steer them through the process."

 

[EnigmaO01]

I wonder if it's still running on a NeXT.

Can you elaborate?

 

[EnigmaO01]

"As near as we can tell, 85% of instructional material in the public education domain is dedicated to the mechanics of various forms of procreation, indicating a deep fear that instinct has degraded to the point where (we must assume) humans are no longer capable of reproducing without visual guides to steer them through the process."

85 percent? Seems really really high. I suppose I could google it but where is this quote from? I don't recall any reference to procreation in any of my history, foreign languages, math, poly sci, English, etc.

 

[cpwill]

85 percent? Seems really really high. I suppose I could google it but where is this quote from? I don't recall any reference to procreation in any of my history, foreign languages, math, poly sci, English, etc.

That is because you are assuming that what you think of as educational material is what they will be grading. The joke there was clearly that aliens would assume if we had a worldwide information sharing device, obviously we would be using it for something useful, like educating ourselves.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

Can you elaborate?

Yes, I can.