Your First Use of the Web

• How many of you were using the Web at the beginning of this school year, September 1995? Using in September 94? September 93?

• How many of you had heard of the Web in September 93? September 92?

• How many of you used Gopher before you used the Web?

Birth of Web at UT Austin

• Browser: On 21 October 92, Mic Kaczmarczik of the Computation Center installed the first Web browser at UT. In his system report, Mic states, "This is a test to see if WWW is something we want to use."

  Can you imagine that less than four years ago, UT had no idea what to do with a Website? It had no idea if the Web would be useful. Is there one person on this campus who feels this way today?

• Training: In Fall 92, the General Libraries taught its first class with a Web component.

• Server: On 7 June 93, Mic Kaczmarczik installed the first Web server on a Computation Center UNIX machine. This has become the central server for UT Austin.

  Today, there are over 275,000 Web servers, according to Alta Vista. UT's central server is among the first 100 in the world. What does that say about the technical vision of the Computation Center UNIX staff?

  In Summer 93, most people had never heard of the Web. Newspapers, magazines, television commercials, billboards, and bookmarks were not plastered with URLs. There were no Internet/Web television programs from PBS and c|net. What there was of the Web was the domain of universities and research centers.

• First UT home pages: In the Fall of 93, Chris Johnson, Mark Brice, and Trent Gayle of the Computation Center each created independent versions of a university home page. Each version consisted of only a few pages.

  Mark and Trent built their versions on servers that no longer exist. Chris built his on the central server.

  These early pages contained UT history from the UT Facts brochure and other general information that was easy to gather.

  While all efforts had great merit, they were little more than hobbies. Chris' version was the most fully developed, and he went on to create the first HTML version of a Computation Center document.

My Involvement in the Web at UT Austin

• First Gopher: In Fall 93, I was heavily involved in maintaining and improving on UT Austin Gopher Central, now only a shell of its former self and soon to be totally dismantled.

  I had begun working with Gopher in February 93, charged with putting up text versions of Computation Center publications.

  After I completed that task, I went on to reorganize the university's Gopher structure and add to it.

  Eventually, I performed many of the functions and duties that I would later perform for the Web server and for Web users and publishers. It was good training.

• Web Reluctantly: During this time, the Web was of little interest to me, partially because there was no decent Web browser for the Mac. I use a Mac and this is a Mac campus. I couldn't be interested in the Web until it became accessible from the Mac. A stable version of Mosaic wasn't released until Nov 93. Meanwhile, Gopher continued to occupied most of my energies.

• Web Finally: Computation Center staff continued urging me to get involved with the Web. Finally, in January 94, with the Web hardware and server software long in place, and with Mosaic a mature browser, I devoted some attention to the Web.

  I took over maintenance of the UT home page from Chris Johnson. I worked on the university Web for almost four full months, creating pages, adding links to new pages from UT departments, and performing other tasks before I would allow it to be announced to the world.

  In April, I registered the central server with CERN and announced it to NCSA. See NCSA's April 94 page, under 24 April.

  That page is now lost. The earliest version of the UT Austin home page still available is dated 03 May 94. It looks like a Gopher menu. Many early Web pages did. However, many of the headings on that version are on the current version of the page.