Updated on 16.12.12 The story is important, when you go to a library to look at old editions of books or comics you are always a little surprised by the graphics and the dust that surrounds their covers.
Above all, it has a certain effect to see yellowed newspaper pages, to see the layout graphics and the news of a distant day.
Even the internet, although young, has made great strides, (see the first of the internet, the number one that made the history of the web ) has grown dramatically and today there are 20 million sites in the world, more or less visited.
There is a certain nostalgia in seeing the first web pages of the most famous sites and perhaps even some regrets, especially for those who have missed the beginning of this incredible new world, its growth and its success.
The history of the web can be found on a site that looks like an old huge library and that keeps all the homepages of any site that has remained online for at least 6 months, from 1996 to today .
Really with great curiosity you can see how the most famous sites were, those of our friends, the news of the time and above all how rough the web pages of 10 years ago were.
Still, the stories of the most famous internet sites that today govern and move mountains of data and money can be recursed; see what they were like and how they evolved over the years. Yahoo! which in 94 was called " Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web " changed its name to 95 and, as we have seen, it was an incredibly successful move.
Google in 96 did not even exist, the first page that
you can look it is from 98 and then as today the word "Beta" appeared; The only search engine in 96 was WebCrawler.com. Mp3.com, the inventor of MP3s, already sold them in 97 and presented Winamp version 1.6.
Sex.com on page 96 was rather shy and showed up with test pages and in 97 a chat on telnet!
Looking at our house you can see, as when looking for old newspapers, all the news of the past since at least 96 consulting the old homepage of sites like Repubblica.it
The archive of internet and web pages can be found on the WayBackMachine website and, by placing this link as a favorite, you can see the old versions of any site we are visiting with just one click.
javascript: location.href = '// web.archive.org/web/*/'+document.location.href;
To get a historical overview of the evolution of the internet, its growth and the technologies that have been gradually introduced over the years, you can look at this interactive infographic that starts from 1990, up to today.
The chart I have shown below was developed by the designers of Vizzuality and Hyperkart, sites where you can find many other interactive charts that summarize different aggregated data from the internet world and others.
The infographic is in Italian and shows the growth of digital culture in the world, showing both how the technological development of the web has evolved, and how the number of surfers and internet traffic has expanded over the years.
The most interesting part, for me and for Navigaweb, is to see how the 5 most used browsers in the world have evolved: Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and Firefox.
The full version of the graph, you can look at it better, in full screen, by going to the Evolutionoftheweb website
Another article discusses how it is possible to make backup copies of any site to keep a copy or to modify it.
