First U.S. Web page went up 10 years ago
By Janet Kornblum
usatoday.com
It's hard to imagine what might have happened with the Web if Paul Kunz had skipped a meeting in Switzerland 10 years ago.
Wednesday marks the 10th anniversary of the first U.S. Web page, created by Kunz, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). He says that if World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee hadn't insisted on the meeting, the Web wouldn't have taken off when it did -- maybe not at all.
Kunz had heard about Berners-Lee's Web project, but frankly, ''I wasn't very interested,'' he says. After all, the Internet and e-mail were already standard among scientists. The Web made it possible to graphically link to documents on other computers, but it was hard to imagine the implications.
Kunz, who was meeting with various scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, grudgingly agreed to a 3 p.m. meeting.
By 6, Kunz was sold on the Web. The two scientists linked a computer near Geneva to one at SLAC. It was the first time that the Web was on the Internet.
Kunz went home and created what was to become the first Web page on a U.S. computer; it gave scientists easy access to SLAC's database of physics papers.
The page went up at 4 p.m. on Dec. 12, 1991. A month later at a conference in France, Berners-Lee clicked over to Kunz's Web page and searched the database. The scientists were sold.
''It was a very dramatic moment,'' Kunz says. ''I realized without that last piece in the demo people would have forgotten about the Web before they got home.'' Instead, they went home and told all their colleagues. Then they started creating their own pages, and the rest, as they say, is history. |
