25 Years of the World Wide Web

We all know it’s 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web on us. Although a worryingly large number of people seem to think that it’s 25 years of the internet that we’re celebrating today. As any fool knows, the internet pre-dated the web by many years, and to think otherwise is to somehow imagine that we only built roads when the car came along, somehow forgetting that horses, bicycles and foot traffic needed roads for many hundreds of years beforehand.

Anyway, it’s always fun to look at archive.org’s Wayback Machine. They were looking after the web because we certainly weren’t (and still aren’t).

Anyway, here’s a 1996 screenshot of my first website www.friday.demon.co.uk – a site that was only permanently killed last year when I finally changed ISP.

Now you’d never have seen that much text on the screen because the resolutions I was using were far smaller. And weren’t frames ace? That mention of Iain Banks at the bottom? That was a ticker no less. James Cridland might be pleased to see that I even had a link for his Media UK site back at that time. I was also linking to the fine folk at Mediatel. I may have been a little obsessed by Helen Baxendale, but the one clear thing missing is photography.

Although we didn’t use the term, that site was really a blog.

In 1995 or 1996 I put the Swindon Evening Advertiser – known locally as the Adver – online and here’s what it looked like.

I used to have to ask editorial each day which stories I could give away free. But a key part of the site was the Swindon football reports – something that you really couldn’t get anywhere online except via the Adver.

But back to my first site. If you linked through to the right place, look what the Wayback Machine captured from that early December capture!


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