what's the first webpage/website you ever visited?

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I went to webcrawler.com, did a porn-related search which led me to persiankitty.com (which looked like this 8 years ago). That was 2/96

― Aaron A., Wednesday, 9 February 2005 21:57 (twenty-one years ago)

(that link is NSFW, btw! ((however quaint))

― Aaron A., Wednesday, 9 February 2005 21:58 (twenty-one years ago)

i think it was the library of congress's american memory site, maybe in 1993 or 1994?

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:04 (twenty-one years ago)

did the web exist then? i remember using mosaic, at any rate.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:05 (twenty-one years ago)

The French newspaper, Libération.

― Michael White (Hereward), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:06 (twenty-one years ago)

Late '95 or early '96, using Netscape on some Sun workstation, my friend showed me his brother's webpage about which I remember nothing except the b&w gif of a cigar dangling from some woman's genitalia done-up to look like a mouth.

― W i l l (common_person), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:08 (twenty-one years ago)

berkeley.edu

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:09 (twenty-one years ago)

Polyester Records - www.polyester.com.au (I think) in 95 some time. I was amazed a record store was online at all, and had mail order. This was well well before Amazon et al.

― Trayce (trayce), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:10 (twenty-one years ago)

http://www.scug.net which probably hasn't changed a whole lot since 1998.

― kate/papa november (papa november), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:11 (twenty-one years ago)

It must have been ed.ac.uk, in October '96 - I was one of those people who first saw the internet when they arrived at university.

― caitlin (caitlin), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:14 (twenty-one years ago)

http://www.umich.edu/ - back when I was in school.

― Leon the Fatboy (Ex Leon), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:16 (twenty-one years ago)

1993? I think Brown University had a web gateway to a bunch of gopher things in their library. Mosaic on Mac OS 7.

Then lynx on dialup!

― he does guitar with his mouth lmao mint (ex machina), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:17 (twenty-one years ago)

God, no idea. This would have been sometime in 1993, probably the original Mozilla site!

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Mosaic/Mozilla/whatever it was. That thing. The Andreesen deal.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:19 (twenty-one years ago)

it was early in '94, I just opened up Mosaic because I saw it on a lab computer and didn't know what it was, probably went to the NSCA page. I remember it was still when they had a 'what's new on the www this week' page. The first site I remember clicking on beyond that was the Louvre, I was knocked out, it was like falling in love.

― teeeny, Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:24 (twenty-one years ago)

NASA.gov, back in 1993 or something...

slowly loading pictures of stellar objects = the future

― DougD, Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:25 (twenty-one years ago)

I looked at the J-League's website on 25 December 1995 at the Internet Cafe at the Pompidou Centre, Paris. I was with three Japanese lads. I could not believe I could just hit a key and do that - it blew my mind away. The bizarre thing is, I don't think I then saw the mnet or got an email address for another 2-3 years.

― darren (darren), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:26 (twenty-one years ago)

I guess it was the NCSA page too, given that it was Mosaic. This was in 1993 from a Sun IPX. The first I went to was probably that fake toilet webcam thing, although I didn't know it was a fake at the time, and the word Webcam wasn't invented. The Louvre was the first great thing right enough. There wasn't a lot around then that wasn't academic so spent more time on Usenet and FTP sites.

― KeithW (kmw), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:38 (twenty-one years ago)

Given that I was at University at the time it's inevitable that the first site I saw was edinfo (as linked to by Caitlin above), but this would have been in 1993. This is before students were routinely given email accounts - I was hugely jealous of a visiting American student who could telnet into her account at Brown.
I'm pretty certain I used NCSA Mosaic 1.0 in the Mac labs. If my memory doesn't deceive me it was very prone to crashing and it was crude as all hell compared to what you can do nowadays.

― Greig (treefell), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:46 (twenty-one years ago)

I do remember using the French minitel system for train schedules in the late '80's.

― Michael White (Hereward), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 22:53 (twenty-one years ago)

MAC OS 7

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:04 (twenty-one years ago)

i remember using gopher for ftp stuff as much as mosaic back then. i also remember seeing freshman surfing the web for porn on mosaic in my high school's computer lab ca. 1994/95. ah, the days.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:05 (twenty-one years ago)

incidentally i remember the "american memory" project existed first on laserdisc (!!) and then the content was eventually transferred over to the web. if i recall there was some kind of web/laserdisc interactivity for a while.

i am old.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:06 (twenty-one years ago)

It was the "Welcome to NCSA Mosaic! Click here to see what's new on the web this week" default page whenever you launched Mosaic at the labs at my alma mater (UCI).

*Ugh, my head just went into a vortex of a mid-life crisis just now*

― donut christ (donut), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:08 (twenty-one years ago)

Probably a Metallica website.

― Jordan (Jordan), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:10 (twenty-one years ago)

Welcome to NCSA Mosaic! Click here to see what's new on the web this week

whoa, flashback...

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:13 (twenty-one years ago)

how the shit do you people remember this stuff?

― Allyzay Dallas Multi-Pass (allyzay), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:14 (twenty-one years ago)

http://tvphotogalleries.com/data/547/1TB-color.jpg

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:15 (twenty-one years ago)

seriously, ally, i remember the american memory thing because i was instructed to use the laserdisc, and later the website, for a class .

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:17 (twenty-one years ago)

Summer of 1994, I think: I was in a summer program at Illinois State University, and they showed us the World Wide Web in a computer lab. I think the first site I saw was the Louvre site, because they made a point of how you could explore the museum and look at the collection online.

(Haha, I didn't read the entire thread, so I didn't see others had gone to the Louvre, too: it must've really been on the cutting edge back then.)

― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:19 (twenty-one years ago)

i wonder if we did the same summer program at isu! i took a writing course there in summer 1992.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:21 (twenty-one years ago)

Amateur(ist): I was there for the Ill. Summer School for the Arts in 1993 and 1994.

(I also used Gopher about a year earlier on a computer at my dad's school. I didn't really know how to navigate it, though: all I found were, like, Seinfeld FAQs and Quantum Leap drinking games.)

(The first website that I remember wanting to visit -- before I even really knew what a website was -- was IUMA, because there was a big article in Rolling Stone about how it was going to revolutionize music.)

― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:24 (twenty-one years ago)

If it wasn't Mosaic, then it was the website of the University of Minnesota because we wanted to ask a question to a co-author of one of our textbooks. This was in 1993.

― MindInRewind (Barry Bruner), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:26 (twenty-one years ago)

I dont remember the first web page I checked out, but I do remember as soon as I got the internet I hit IRC with a vengeance.

― Dude, are you a 15 year old asian chick? (jingleberries), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:28 (twenty-one years ago)

there was a big article in Rolling Stone about how it was going to revolutionize music

aww. That's even more quaint than Persian kitty.

I think the first stuff I read on the internet was academic papers. Academic papers about Grant Morrison and The Cure, of course.

― Fish fingers all in a line (kenan), Wednesday, 9 February 2005 23:54 (twenty-one years ago)

i went on the toy story website in 1996 at my cousins house, it was kind of fun. it wasn't until summer '97 when i was about 13 or 14 that the invention of the internet took on its true significance, as we all trooped to the house of the boy who could make gifs of bouncing boobs...

― elwisty (elwisty), Thursday, 10 February 2005 00:05 (twenty-one years ago)

http://www.pixelscapes.com/spatulacity/button.htm

― polyphonic (polyphonic), Thursday, 10 February 2005 00:07 (twenty-one years ago)

I am SUCH an online newbie comparative to you guys. I don't even remember hearing about the Internet until 1995, and even then, it took me until about 1996 to want this "Internet" thing enough to where I made a promise to myself to do whatever I could to access the Internet in the next year, i.e. 1997. Which I did. At first, slowly, because there were only a couple of computers at my school that were even hooked up to a modem, and I would go online only about once a month, but then, by the next semester, i.e. the fall of my senior year in HS, all the computers were hooked up to the Internet, and I began my lurking.

First site I went to, BTW: The Excite site, because it was the homepage of the first computer with online access I operated. I, of course, searched for Duran Duran. Imagine my surprise when I found out I wasn't the only fan of theirs out there in the world! *laugh*

― Surreal Addiction (Dee the Lurker), Thursday, 10 February 2005 03:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Prob around 1994 or 1995, UC Irvine's web site

― Orbit (Orbit), Thursday, 10 February 2005 03:19 (twenty-one years ago)

1994, 12 years old, nirvana fanpage. i didn't really realize exactly how useful the web was for stuff other than fanboy-ish things until maybe 97.

― firstworldman (firstworldman), Thursday, 10 February 2005 03:26 (twenty-one years ago)

http://kzsu.stanford.edu/uwi/pwei, late 1995.

― kit brash (kit brash), Thursday, 10 February 2005 05:25 (twenty-one years ago)

the only firm memory i have was the first pc they setup for the web on campus at the library, and i signed up and went to the onion's site, and i remember it taking forever so i bet it was full page graphics at the time.

― andrew s (andrew s), Thursday, 10 February 2005 06:56 (twenty-one years ago)

I only used Internet for the first time in 1998, when I started a job with a regular Web access. The first page I saw was probably the home page of my employer, The Finnish Environment Institute. I had heard about Internet a few years before that, and my high school had an Internet access too, but I wasn't interested in it back then.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Thursday, 10 February 2005 07:13 (twenty-one years ago)

what aaron a said, except i used altavista.

― bass braille (....), Thursday, 10 February 2005 07:19 (twenty-one years ago)

we had to do a webct component of my undergrad psych degree in 1999. it ALWAYS used to take copious amounts of time to load.

― gem (trisk), Thursday, 10 February 2005 07:28 (twenty-one years ago)

we used to have an hour or so one lunchtime a week when people would come and show us stuff and, as above, it was a gopher page (there was a spate of archie comic related tools if i remember correctly, veronica and jughead, which, being english, meant nothing to us).

my first email address had, i think, '!'s or '%'s delimiting the fields (this was a JaNet address and was backwards compared to modern email addresses). didn't use it much despite having friends in various other universities around the country all with similar addresses, didn't seem a big deal. my second email address was a big long complicated x400 thing that was a pain to remember (C=GB;A=NHS;P=NHS National;O=Organisation;S=Bloggs;G=Fred@...).

my smallest email address was 15 characters long, including the @ and the .com

― koogs (koogs), Thursday, 10 February 2005 11:30 (twenty-one years ago)

I wandered past an xterm running lynx in late 94 at University. Ended up at the White House site and saw a picture of Al Gore on the screen. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen and re-activated geek tendencies I'd hidden since I got rid of my Commodore 64 in 1988. And here I am.

― Dave B (daveb), Thursday, 10 February 2005 12:42 (twenty-one years ago)

I believe it was the Sebadoh website

― Andrew Blood Thames (Andrew Thames), Thursday, 10 February 2005 12:44 (twenty-one years ago)

Does this address mean anything to anyone?

http://www.maths.monash.edu.au/~rjh/stereolab

― Markelby (Mark C), Thursday, 10 February 2005 12:54 (twenty-one years ago)

I can't remember, I was too young at the time. I used the net before the web existed.

― Andrew (enneff), Thursday, 10 February 2005 12:55 (twenty-one years ago)

I say address because the link doesn't actually work. I bet the wayback archive has it, though.

(if any non-work surfers want to go to sexaphone.com, that's the site my mates and I mischievously pulled up on loads of uni computers after we'd done our finals and were bumming around all day. I have no idea if it's still, um, active)

― Markelby (Mark C), Thursday, 10 February 2005 12:56 (twenty-one years ago)

http://kzsu.stanford.edu/uwi/pwei, late 1995

KZSU! - I was DJing there at that time.

The first webpage I saw was probably the NCSA Mosaic home page sometime in fall '93. Probably from a Mac in the campus computer lab.

― o. nate (onate), Thursday, 10 February 2005 12:57 (twenty-one years ago)

I can't remember the year, but I'm guessing '95 .. I used the text-based freenet at first, and found the Ultimate Band List, which led me to Jazz Butcher & Pere Ubu websites.. That's the earliest I can remember.

― dave225 (Dave225), Thursday, 10 February 2005 13:07 (twenty-one years ago)

Mark I visited that page a few times I think, what're you getting at?

― Andrew Blood Thames (Andrew Thames), Thursday, 10 February 2005 13:08 (twenty-one years ago)

> http://www.maths.monash.edu.au/~rjh/stereolab

ha, i still email robin on a weekly basis (had one from him today in fact). was home of 4ad and indiepop list archives and my f**** m*** website before i got my own webspace. he also slept on my floor once on his way back to melbourne from leicester.

― koogs (koogs), Thursday, 10 February 2005 13:15 (twenty-one years ago)

In summer 1997 I suddenly realised what the blue e on my computer at work was. I went to yahoo.com and typed in Beastie Boys, which was just the first thing that came into my head.

― Madchen (Madchen), Thursday, 10 February 2005 13:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Actually, I now think it might have been Netscape, not Explorer.

― Madchen (Madchen), Thursday, 10 February 2005 13:19 (twenty-one years ago)

YOU ARE ALL THE GEEKS, I never saw the internet before 97.

excite was my first page up, hell knows what i searched for.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Thursday, 10 February 2005 13:48 (twenty-one years ago)

www.thechemicalbrothers.com in 97

― Big Baby Bingo (Chris V), Thursday, 10 February 2005 14:18 (twenty-one years ago)

I remember being at a Scout camp in 96 or 97 and being given a demonstration of the Internet. We got to ask the nice lady to look something up and I said "Oasis!" cos I was a fan. The first site theat came up was an "Oasis suck"-type hate page. I remember being faintly bemused as to (a) why someone would hate Oasis and (b) why they would go to the trouble of making a website about it. Also (c) that there was a lot more inconsequential stuff than I had possibly imagined. I got the net at home at Xmas '97. I was 14 then btw. The first message board I visited regularly was a Championship Manager one.

― Crackity (Crackity Jones), Thursday, 10 February 2005 14:34 (twenty-one years ago)

I think late 1993, the Mosaic webpage.

― The Ghost of Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Thursday, 10 February 2005 14:43 (twenty-one years ago)

(b) why they would go to the trouble of making a website about it.

This has often bewildered me too, why are there so many sites about actually disliking stuff?

― Ste (Fuzzy), Thursday, 10 February 2005 14:44 (twenty-one years ago)

maths.monash! I was on some sort of listserv involving that, but don't remember what it was. (ok it had to be either about the cure, gaming, or sexuality I'm sure)

― teeny (teeny), Thursday, 10 February 2005 15:17 (twenty-one years ago)

i don't remember. i only remember that i used compuserve. which didn't last long as i had to log in long distance (?), i quickly changed to another provider.

― stevie nixed (stevie nixed), Thursday, 10 February 2005 15:22 (twenty-one years ago)

www.netscape.com in '95

― Chewshabadoo (Chewshabadoo), Thursday, 10 February 2005 15:24 (twenty-one years ago)

Ah, monash. I wondered for years what a monash was.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 10 February 2005 15:27 (twenty-one years ago)

what is it?

― teeny (teeny), Thursday, 10 February 2005 15:31 (twenty-one years ago)

it's a name.

http://www.monash.edu.au/about/history.html

― koogs (koogs), Thursday, 10 February 2005 15:34 (twenty-one years ago)

http://assets.monash.edu.au/images/sir-john-monash.jpg

is this emperor tomato ketchup?

― teeny (teeny), Thursday, 10 February 2005 15:36 (twenty-one years ago)

1995 or so, used my dad's university connection to look up Bartlett's Quotations for a school essay, and then my friend made me look up Christian Bale pictures which we drew on using MS Paint.

― jocelyn (Jocelyn), Friday, 11 February 2005 01:20 (twenty-one years ago)

I remember a friend taking me to work and using Yahoo to find this picture of Oum Kalthoum, which took forever to load, and when it finally did, it was remarkably unflattering. This was probably in the mid-90s. Anyway, I think that may have been the first that I initiated. He may have showed me a few sites before that. Also, I think he probably said, "There's this thing called Yahoo."

― RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Friday, 11 February 2005 03:03 (twenty-one years ago)

Thanks to my dad I out-geek (probably) all of you on this one. He worked as one of the early programmers for the (Canadian) provincial then federal civil service, so in the eighties I used to go into his office where I'd get to use the gov't phone lines to dial up a BBS in Florida. The cool part is that it was one of the very first multi-user (16 modem connections) boards, MajorBBS I think the program was called, made by Galacticomm, so it allowed live text chat. So no, not quite a website, more like IRC, but way neat nonetheless.

― Kim (Kim), Friday, 11 February 2005 04:21 (twenty-one years ago)

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