It depends on who you ask, but Web 1.0 is usually seen as the era of the Web prior to the bursting of the dotcom bubble, when sites were mostly static pages and information was simply being made available on the internet, rather than exclusively for it. We've avoided including short-lived "bubble businesses" in this list of five defining moments of Web 1.0.
The Tech is MIT's campus newspaper and was the first newspaper to be available on the Web. Its Web server was the first to serve up a complete newspaper, predating every newspaper in existence's Web presence. Popular 2008 opinion claims print magazines and newspapers will be completely replaced by online versions, making The Tech even more notable.
In February 2008, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for $44.6bn, but Yahoo declined. Not bad, considering Yahoo began in a trailer. It was founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang — two electrical engineering PhD candidates — and they simply wanted to catalogue interesting websites. "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was its original name. Thankfully the name was shortly changed to Yahoo, which they backronymed into "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Less thankfully, they insisted on sticking an exclamation mark after it.
Founded by Jeff Bezos the previous year, Amazon is not one of the greatest success stories of the internet — it's one of the few that survived the epic dotcom bubble burst in 2000, despite having to fire much of its workforce, posting a yearly net loss of $1.4bn according to Amazonia, and failing to excite the world as a publisher of mostly public domain books (did you know that?), all in the same 12 months.
Back when the site began as AuctionWeb — selling a broken laser pointer to a collector of broken laser pointers — you didn't have to pay to list or sell the crap stashed in your garage. That eventually changed, earning eBay founder Pierre Omidyar billions. Apart from turning a profit from the start, not to mention surviving the dotcom bubble, what makes eBay particularly interesting is that it relies on its users being honest. And interested in buying utter rubbish.
On 10 January 2000, America Online announced it was to acquire Time Warner for $160bn, creating a $350bn corporate giant and the largest media company on the planet, in the largest acquisition in corporate history. Analyst Phil Leigh told CNET News at the time, "If it hasn't been evident to most of us yet, it should be obvious to us now that the internet is about audio and video and not just merely text and graphics". Apparently AOL knew that, too, and bet $160bn on it being true.
The current era of the internet is often dubbed Web 2.0, but it's really just an evolution of Web 1.0. Much modern Web 2.0 technology got started at the dawn of the Web 1.0 era, and has evolved over the last 10 years to give us the advanced interfaces and online applications we rely on today.
Another Netscape great, and first launching with Netscape Navigator 2.0 as LiveScript, Brendan Eich's JavaScript got its name after a collaboration with Sun Microsystems in December of the same year. Now stupendously prolific, JavaScript helped enable interactivity within websites, and now underpins AJAX — the modern Web technology that enabled desktop environment-like interactivity on sites such as Google Docs, Flickr and millions of blogs and Web 2.0 properties.
Jorn Barger first coined the term "weblog" after "logging" things he found on the "Web" on his site RobotWisdom. He's still a blogger. But it was later, around April 1999, that Peter Merholz invented the word "blog" after deciding to pronounce "weblog" as "wee-blog", but deciding it was too long a word
Mere months after Merholz introduced the word "blog" to the Webosphere (we can coin words too), Pyra Labs launched Blogger, allowing the world to easily create their own blogs, for free. Pitas.com launched its similar free weblog service earlier, in July, but Blogger stole the show, ultimately being acquired by internet behemoth Google.
Originally launched atop the commercial .com domain before switching to .org, Wikipedia is now one of the most visited sites on the Web, and testament to the possibilities of harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds — one of the fundamental aspects of what is known as Web 2.0.
Originally a hub for just tech news, digg has since expanded into many new areas, including politics, entertainment news and after months of user requests, images and videos, too. It's a socially moderated news site, run by its users, and one of the most successful products of the Web 2.0 era in terms of popularity, despite its lack of a successful acquisition.
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So, did you zdnet journos cut your teeth at one of murdoch's tabloids? If Rob McCool developed the Http daemon in the mid-70s then he was a child genius. Simply look him up on wikipedia and you'll see he was born in 1973. Plus, if he did write it in the mid-70s why isn't he the so-called "father of the web" - I', surprised you lot haven't changed history and decided gates invented the internet - muppets!