Fifteen years on, I was there on day one

The 15th anniversary of the placing of http/html into the public domain has arrived in the twinkling of an eye. Bill Thompson has the actual document that did the deed.

BBC NEWS | Web in infancy, says Berners-Lee.

The world wide web is "still in its infancy", the web's inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has told BBC News.

He was speaking ahead of the 15th anniversary of the day the web's code was put into the public domain by Cern, the lab where the web was developed.

I remember this time well. I reported it for my new magazine, The World Wide Web Newsletter. The first issue of 3W (as it came to be known) was published in the autumn of that year. It wasn't the key story (that was some eurowaffle), but it was the second news story.

I'd spent the spring and summer working on what started as a newsletter and turned into a printed magazine that sold on newsstands. I was working at Goldsmiths' College, University of London and had recently acquired a Demon IP dialup account. I had been online for five years and was only working at Goldsmiths' (in the Computer Department) to get access to the IP internet (though actually Goldsmiths' had no such access). Strange days.
I was a fine art graduate of Goldsmiths' who had been struck with a vision and a revelation in1988 when first encountering the networks. By 1993 I was fully aware of everything going on online. I took the name 'World Wide Web' for my little mag because I thought it was a great phrase. The web itself was so much in its infancy that the magazine was not a web magazine. It was an evangelising internet magazine that covered this new thing called the Web in passing.

I put the mag together in the basement of my flat in Hackney, east London, using a Mac and some desk top publishing software. I was as much in love with desk top publishing as with the internet.

The editorial for the first issue stated: "This Word Wide Web demands constant attention. It is the mission of the World Wide Web Newsletter to pay that attention, to keep tabs on the fast changing inter and outer net that comprises this new continent. This newsletter is aimed as much at those on the outside looking in as those on the inside looking, well, looking.

The Internet is in flux - we have little idea what tools and resources next year will bring, let alone the next five or ten. This is indeed a new continent, and I hope you will come along and explore."

I had just quit my rather decent job at Goldsmiths' (more or less the only real job I've ever had) and cashed in my tiny pension to fund the mag. I knew it couldn't really make any money, but I was determined to shout this stuff from the rooftops. Everybody I knew thought I was mad, but I knew. It wasn't until the following year that I started to earn money from this space, becoming Time Out's internet advisor. I exhibited at the first UK Internet World exhibition in 1994. I was hired as the launch editor of .net magazine - and that's where The World Wide Web Newsletter ended up. Then I went on to do real web startups. I invented the cybercafe (word and deed) and the domain name industry (NetNames, 1996).  But in the summer of 1993 all that was unknowable. Very few people knew what was brewing (Alan Meckler, I take my hat off to you), and most of them were highly technical. So I played my part in this incredible story. I introduced a lot of people to the web one way or another. A generation of journalists passed through my Hackney basement and went away converted. I've written and startupped and evangelised about it ever since. I still have the exact same love for it that I had in '93 (and in '88 for that matter).

Myself, for one reason or another I never yet made my fortune from this game. But I'm still working on it. Hope to see you at WidgetWebExpo. Widgets are the future. Take it from someone who knows.

Comments

[Lee]

Nice reflections, Ivan. I bumped into you at Internet People and LIFT last year, among other things, but I also remember the opening of Cyberia, NetNames and .net. I was using the net for political comms in those days, and it was not until 1996 that we set up our first company to make web stuff for moneyz.

Those were heady days indeed. Respect due.

[Sam Michel]

Sitting on bags of cement in the basement of Cyberia. Working in the converted toilets at the top of Time Out. Riding bikes round the warehouse space at Kendall Place. Them's the days ;-)

[paulpod]

Respect. I remember .net mag, it was unbelieveably lovely in the first year. Remember visiting London, cyberia, etc as a wide eyed undergrad in 94(?) all excited by this brave new world.