Birthday of the Web

During a workshop in Berkeley on digital preservation sponsored by the Library of Congress a dinner conversation about whether it was time to celebrate the ten year anniversary of the Web, I did a bit of research based on my first experience with the web - when I downloaded an early version of Mosaic:

which must have been sometime late in 1993

This does show that bits can last at least ten years - those first versions of Mosaic are still available for download at the same address they were back then. Perhaps even on the same servers.

However, since I was with a group of librarians, my research skills were quickly trumped, by:

using one of today's best archival search tools

to find more authoritative information from:

the W3C

and:

the NCSA itself

all of which clearly put us beyond the 10 year anniversary.

(last updated 18 April 2003)