25 years ago today, Sir Tim Berners-Lee filed the proposal for what was to become the World Wide Web. The Web’s 25th Anniversary has been celebrated all over the World (Wide Web) today in different ways. I have personally celebrated it by digging up old memories of my first experiences of the web, and traces of my own first websites using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

I unfortunately don’t remember what was the first website I visited , but I do remember when I got my first e-mail address. It was in 1996 when I used our school’s first Internet-connected computer (with a modem of course). It was a Hotmail address and I must have been a very early adopter since the first snapshots of Hotmail in the Wayback Machine are from December 1996, or HoTMaiL as it was written back then. I tried to register with the user name pernilla but it was already taken so I registered pernillan, as in Pernilla N, or as you could translate it from Swedish “The Pernilla” : ) Ever since then pernillan has been my nickname almost everywhere on the Internet, and sometimes even AFK (Away From Keyboard).

I wrote my own first website from scratch in HTML during the first programming course I ever took, in the Spring of 2000 when I started at Uppsala University. The first capture of the site in the Wayback Machine, that I called “Pernilla’s Parking Lot” is from January 2002. If you want to browse around on it today I would recommend to visit the capture from September 2002 instead though as it also includes some pictures. Unfortunately not the picture on the front page though as you can see in the screenshot here, but I did find that front page picture on my computer now though, so you can see it at the end of this blog post…

Something else that is unfortunately not working on the site now is the two small applications that I wrote using HTML, CGI and ML in a programming course. It was a web chat, and the first (and so far only?) game I have ever built. It was a Yahtzee game that it was very easy to cheat in as you could use backspace to roll the dice again if you weren’t happy with the result. : )

I want to end this blog post with some quotes from Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Message on the #Web25 Anniversary Website, as I think that what he writes is really important:

Today, and throughout this year, we should celebrate the Web’s first 25 years. But though the mood is upbeat, we also know we are not done. We have much to do for the Web to reach its full potential. We must continue to defend its core principles and tackle some key challenges. To name just three:

How do we connect the nearly two-thirds of the planet who can’t yet access the Web?

Who has the right to collect and use our personal data, for what purpose and under what rules?

How do we create a high-performance open architecture that will run on any device, rather than fall back into proprietary alternatives?