The Web turned 15 on August 6. The BBC, which offers an interactive timeline, dates the birth of the web to August 6, 1991, when “Tim Berners-Lee formally introduced his world wide web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.” The first week of January 1995 I announced the availability of my first professional web site, for the Association of America’s Public Television Stations (APTS), hosted at http://www.universe.digex.net/~apts (it would be few months before we hosted on our own domain at http://www.apts.org/); around that time I believed it to be one of the first 10,000 sites online (seven months later, according to the BBC, there were just 18,957 sites online, with over 342,000 twelve months after that, so it seems quite likely that the APTS site was indeed well within that first 10,000 figure).
My original personal web site, back then also hosted at Digex, went online in 1994 even prior to the APTS site. A version from 1997, complete with original 1995 graphics and photos of a decade-younger me, is still available in the Wayback Machine.
Congrats on being an early adopter. 🙂 Wayback doesn’t have the original version of my first professional web site, which was for the UC Berkeley Sponsored Projects Office in 1994 I believe, so I might have been one of those first 10,000 too. My first personal home page is likewise no longer available, but a version from 1996 is, complete with Geek Code. 🙂
Oh this takes me back. I remember news organizations like NPR trying to describe the web as ‘the graphical part of the internet’ like it was separate somehow. And I remember Digex; are they still around?
And those 3D graphics look like early Bryce… back when it was Mac-only. Sigh.