WWW History (as I see it)

One of the things that has been bothering me lately is the number of people and firms who claim to have been on the Web since right after the turn of the century and I don’t mean the year 2000 or 2001.

I was doing some research on website conversion strategies and came across an article about a man who had been writing copy for websites since 1986. Hmmm?

Let’s see…Tim Berners-Lee’s team at CERN brought us the first rudimentary web in 1989 and it was another 4 years until Marc Anderson came up with the web-browser Mosaic.

In 1994, the real commercial capabilities came to the forefront, but even then, Internet Magazine (which launched that year) touted a review of 100 websites as the largest list ever compiled. So I guess our industry is now old enough that we can start telling 20 year old industry war stories and no one will question the timeline.

We have 2 documents on the wall in our offices from 1995; the first one is a form I used for submitting a client’s site to the existing Search Engines. I called this service “Search Engine Submission” (catchy huh?) as SEO was not yet a part of the culture. The other document was the domain registration form for this same client, which I am proud to say, is still a client. He knows how long I have been doing this, so I guess I won’t be able to tell any stories that are older then 11 years.