Happy Internet Day!

Today, August 6, back in 1991, was the day the first web page went online.

HERE’S AN ARCHIVED COPY.

The World Wide Web was the brainchild of Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, who proposed it back in 1980.

MORE ON HIM.

That was presumably sometime after Al Gore invented the Internet.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

12 thoughts on “Happy Internet Day!”

  1. +J.M.J+
    I think I understood about 35% of the content of that first web page. Guess I’m not a technogeek. 🙂
    In Jesu et Maria,

  2. When will “Happy Catholic Internet Day!” be? Do we know when the first Catholic page went on-line? Of course, message boards preceeded the web. “alt.sex” is the most infamous and early message board. If I recall correctly, there was a Catholic message board (“alt.religion.catholic”?) around 1989 or so, but I don’t know when it actually began.

  3. Rosemarie —
    If you’d been an ordinary net user back in the day, you would have understood almost all those terms. They were normal Internet services.
    Pazdziernik —
    Those were not “message boards”; they were Usenet newsgroups. (Usenet was the newsgroup portion of the Internet, more or less.) “Bulletin boards” were the message boards of the 80’s and 90’s; you got onto them by calling up someone’s house, logging in, and uploading or downloading messages or files.
    bit.listserv.catholic was the first I know about. There was already a Catholic mailing list, and a gate was instituted between Bitnet (a nationwide network meant to serve university faculty, as I recall). I don’t know when the mailing list started, but bit.listserv.catholic started in September 1992.
    Back in the day, really, there really wasn’t enough call for a specifically Catholic newsgroup. People who started up Catholic mailing lists quickly found them getting coopted by Anglicans and Greek Orthodox folks, anyway. (In any ordinary newsgroup, such topic-breakers would have been summarily dealt with, but we didn’t feel like we could flame or throw them out in a Christian or Catholic group.)
    I have some fond memories, but all in all, St. Blog’s has been a real move forward for Catholics.

  4. Actually, one of the prime sites for apologetics back in the day was good ol’ alt.mythology. It was a happy thing when the Catechism came out, so we could just start quoting from it.

  7. Haloscan is coded so as to prevent unclosed tags* from spilling into subsequent comments. It would be very helpful if Typepad were do something equivalent.
    *This often happen when someone forgets to put the / in the closing tag, resulting in two opening tags, both of which need to be closed before the spillage can be solved.

  8. Relating to the earlier post, “A Brilliant Idea that Isn’t,” in which there was a discussion of the unlikely event of internet control being given to the U.N., I offer the following for those who may have fears or concerns:
    It is therefore Our earnest wish that the United Nations Organization may be able progressively to adapt its structure and methods of operation to the magnitude and nobility of its tasks. May the day be not long delayed when every human being can find in this organization an effective safeguard of his personal rights; those rights, that is, which derive directly from his dignity as a human person, and which are therefore universal, inviolable and inalienable.
    Blessed Pope John XIII,
    Pacem in Terris
    April 11, 1963

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