Web Development History is a site giving a technical history of the web, organized by year, from CGI scripts to DHTML and Flash.
HN commenters debate its accuracy, correcting claims about dynamic websites, JavaScript timing and early web servers in 1994.
> Dynamic websites is a core idea of the modern internet and that concept did not exist in 1994 internet.
CGI and other forms of dynamicity absolutely existed in 1994[0].
> JavaScript did not exist.
IT just needed 1 more year!
> Modern internet is also real-time and largely community driven. Even the notion of these did not exist in 1994 internet.
Check out MUDs and MOOs. Lambda was 3 years old in 1994. Wired called online virtual worlds "the addiction of the '90s[1]."
> Websockets did not exist.
But Berkeley sockets did (although you might have had to do some tinkering with Winsock on Windows!) , and I'm curious what you can do over a web socket that you can't do over a traditional socket.
> Social networks did not exist.
MUDs and mOOs again.
> Video conferencing did not exist.
Intel actually released a "kit" to enable this on regular Windows PCs in 1994. Cost a pretty penny though[2]!
>Collaborative document editing did not exist.
The first instance of a collaborative real-time editor was demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in 1968, in The Mother of All Demos. Widely available implementations of the concept took decades to appear. A piece of software called Instant Update was released for the classic Mac OS in 1991 from ON Technology[3].
> The ideas of wearables and always connected devices (smart watches, speakers, thermostats, lights, etc) did not exist in 1994.
Proto wearables absolutely existed in 1994[4].
X10 was developed in 1975 by Pico Electronics of…
CERN httpd (1990) and NCSA httpd (1993) came before Netscape Netsite (dec 1994) and were both free and open source.
When Netscape did launch their server it was relatively expensive starting at $1495. For $5000 you got SSL support: https://books.google.com/books?id=djgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10.
http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1995q1/0010.html
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (December 15, 1994) -- Netscape Communications Corporation today announced the availability of the 1.0 versions of its Netscape Navigatorand Netsite server line, including the Netsite Commerce Serverwith integrated security. The availability of these open software products, announced in September, enables Netscape Communications to offer the first complete, secure client/server software system for conducting commerce and exchanging information via the Internet and private TCP/IP networks.
Also:
https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1995-apache-microsoft-iis-web-server-market/
According to The Web Server Book, at the second International WWW Conference, held in Chicago in October 1994, a straw poll of attendees showed that “90 percent of present Webmasters used the NCSA server”
It seems JavaScript was first released, just internally, in May 1995 in a pre-alpha version of Netscape 2.0. It would not be publicly announced until December 1995. Netscape 2.0 didn't even come out until March 1996 and even then it was language version 1.0 which was extremely defective. The first version of the language that actually worked was JavaScript 1.1 that came out in August 1996. CSS on the other hand first premiered with IE3 that came out in August 1996.
* https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/msie/
* https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1995-the-birth-of-javascript/
The distinction either way is trivial, because at that time nobody was using either CSS or JavaScript as they required proprietary APIs. There was no DOM specification at that time.