Those are not oldest web pages ever, they were developed some time earlier by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.

Source: http://www.tivi.fi/kaikki_uutiset/netin+katkoista+loytyi+aarre+talta+nayttaa+yhdysvaltain+ensimmainen+wwwsivu/a1024672

On 10 October 1994, Opera CTO Hakon Lie posted a proposal for Cascading HTML style sheets. Now, two decades on, CSS has become one of the modern web’s most important building blocks

He says that if these standards were not made, “the web would have become a giant fax machine where pictures of text would be passed along.”

Cascading HTML style sheets — a proposal
http://www.w3.org/People/howcome/p/cascade.html

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has defended his decision not to build in security at the onset of the world wide web.

It’s easy to be wise in hindsight, but Sir Tim explained that at the point he invented the world wide web 25 years ago, he wanted to create a platform that developers would find familiar and easy to use. Baking in security at that point might have worked against that goal, he said.

“[The web] might not have taken off if it had been too difficult,” he told an audience at IPExpo Europe this morning.

Sir Tim’s views are in contrast with those of another internet pioneer, Vint Cerf, who recently said he regretted not building in security to basic internet protocols. Berners-Lee strongly supported the current push towards always-on crypto (https) for websites now underway, so his differing views are more to do with timing and priorities than principles.

“The idea that privacy is dead is hopelessly sad,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee said. “We have to build systems that allow for privacy.”

“People have the right to see how their data is being used,” he said, adding that he prefer to talk about “rich data” rather than Big Data.

“We should build a world where I have control of my data and sell it to you. Users should have control, access to and ownership of their data,” Berners-Lee said.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web 24 years ago he thought he’d created an egalitarian tool that would share information for the greater good. But it hasn’t quite worked out like that. What went wrong?

It’s possible to have a certain sympathy for Sir Tim Berners-Lee as he looks at what people have done to his glorious world wide web.

Instead of it remaining the glorious bottom-up egalitarian creation it once was, it’s become infested with people like Facebitch using it to scramble for filthy lucre.

Over in The Guardian, Stuart Jeffries is worrying about what has been done to Berners-Lee’s creation:

Sceptical is right. The world wide web has increasingly facilitated the global spread of misogyny, the hate crime of revenge porn, corporate and state surveillance, bullying, racism, the life-ruining, time-wasting, Sisyphean digital servitude of deleting spam, the existentially crushing spadework of fatuous finessing of those lies, one’s Facebook profiles. It has spread from the grassroots up, from Berners-Lee’s desktop to the world, has been coterminous with lots of other intolerable things.

The go-to economist on this point is William Baumol. He changes the meanings of words a little bit when discussing this: he uses the word invention to describe the creation of new stuff, the world wide web for example, and the word innovation to mean “derivative invention” – or, if you prefer, what people go off to use that new invention to do (as opposed to the more usual meaning of innovation: incremental improvements).

Regardless of the uses to which Bell and Edison imagined people would put their inventions, people used them how they saw fit.

Another way to put this is that human beings are hugely, vastly, interested in a certain number of things (think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs here) and we’re going to use any new invention that comes along to advance our interests in those things. Food water and sex are pretty high on that list.

If we look to past inventions, we can see several examples of the Hierarchy at work.

Berners-Lee did indeed invent the web: but an invention is as a child. One can create it but then it does need to be released out there into the world and what becomes of it will only partially be determined by who and how it was created: interaction with the rest of that world will have a great deal of influence on what finally becomes of it.

The FIFA World Cup 1994 will be remembered on the first major sporting event in the communication were also treated their own website.

During the following years the network also saw many of the currently popular online services such as Amazon (1994), Yahoo (1994), Google (1996) and The New York Times (1995). On the other hand, for example, Wikipedia (2001) and Facebook (2004) are much more recent arrivals

Two decades, a web node has re-invented several times. Changes in the wind is blowing in a continuous stream, with interactive technologies, mobile devices and social networks have changed the way we use it. Also, the amount of content is exploding at the same time.

Although Hotmail and Amazon have been familiar with the brands over the web from the beginning, only a real wizard would be able to mid-1990s, predicts the rise of Google and Facebook, as well as companies caused by the change in the size of the surrounding world.

Older websites filings Archive.org archive will investigate the history of the web-user help. However prompt a visit to the archives of web pages to reveal the integrity of how the furious pace of development has taken place.

Source: http://www.tivi.fi/blogit/webin+kaksi+vuosikymmenta/a997528

The conventional history of computing leaves out some key thinkers.

When Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” first appeared in The Atlantic’s pages in July 1945, it set off an intellectual chain reaction that resulted, more than four decades later, in the creation of the World Wide Web.

In that landmark essay, Bush described a hypothetical machine called the Memex: a hypertext-like device capable of allowing its users to comb through a large set of documents stored on microfilm, connected via a network of “links” and “associative trails” that anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web.

Historians of technology often cite Bush’s essay as the conceptual forerunner of the Web. And hypertext pioneers like Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee have all acknowledged their debt to Bush’s vision. But for all his lasting influence, Bush was not the first person to imagine something like the Web.

In 1895, Otlet and his partner Henri La Fontaine—a Belgian senator and future Nobel Peace Prize Winner—launched a project called the Universal Bibliography, or Répertoire Bibliographique Universel, an ambitious plan to catalog of all the world’s published information.

After winning the support of the Belgian government, the two men hired a staff of catalogers who eventually created more than 15 million entries stored on index cards (the state-of-the-art storage technology of the time), all classified using a system called the Universal Decimal Classification, an adapted version of the Dewey Decimal System. At one point, they even ran a commercial service that would allow anyone to submit a query and receive an answer via telegraph, for a small fee.