World Wide Web Day was nearly called Mesh Day

We could have been backrubbing things on the Mesh.

The actual first logo for the World Wide Web (Robert Cailliau/Wikimedia Commons)

Tim Berners-Lee had a few possible names for the World Wide Web.

The Mesh. Mine of Information. The Information Mine.

Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the web, discarded ‘TIM’ and ‘MOI’ as too self-centered, writes Patrick Howell O’Neill for The Daily Dot.

“‘Mesh’ [was] thrown out because it sounded too much like ‘mess,’” O’Neil writes.

Berners Lee says World Wide Web was settled on because it:

“…stressed the decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed to be global of course. “

Even Google, the search engine of the internet, changed its name.

It was initially christened BackRub.

In 1998, the company decided to rebrand.

Otherwise, we could all be  “BackRubbing” things now.

First Photo on the World Wide Web

On July 18, 1992, a photo was posted online for the first time. This was it.

“The Horrible CERN Girls”–were four CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) women.

Songs by the group included titles like “Daddy’s Lab,” “My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize” and “Strong Interaction.”

(The last one is a four fundamental forces pun.)

On July 18, 1992, they made history. Michele remembers:

“Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of “the CERN girls” to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the “World Wide Web”. I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim’s now famous “info.cern.ch”. How was I to know that I was passing a historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture of a band ever to be clicked on in a web browser!”

First Website on the World Wide Web

Here’s a copy of the first website.

It wasn’t about cats, even if they are the engine of the internet.

The first website just explained what the world wide web was.

Very meta.

Via: Smithsonian

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