10TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST U.S. WEB PAGE

10TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST U.S. WEB PAGE



STANFORD, Calif. (Wireless Flash) – The world wide web celebrates a milestone tomorrow (Dec. 12): The 10th anniversary of the first U.S. webpage. The website was designed by Paul Kunz for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) to share research papers with other physicists around the world. Unlike the colorful webpages of today – with all their flashing images and whirligigs – the first web page had a plain, black-and-white layout consisting of three lines of text, a link to an e-mail database and a link to a database of physics articles. The website included a search engine so scientists could look up research papers on any topic in the database – an element that is now a key tool in navigating the web, says Kunz. In his words, “The search query was essential for the web to take hold.” Today, the SLAC webpage is much different from the original, but it still contains the original database of physics articles.

Tue 12-11-01