It’s been a good time recently for lovers of IT history with 3 very significant dates:
- 6 August 1991. 20 years ago saw the publication of the first ever website.
- 12 August 1981. 30 years ago IBM released the IBM PC.
- 27 July 1981. 30 years ago and MS-DOS was born.
It’s hard for me to believe that these things took place 20 to 30 years ago. It just shows that IT isn’t the fledgeling industry it is sometimes still treated as. Or it’s just me getting old.
6 August 1991 – World’s First Website
The world’s first website address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and unfortunately there is no record of the actual page. The closest we have is this page, which gives the page as it was in November 1992. There is also an email from the creator of the page, Tim Berners-Lee here.
The only people who could see the page were its creator and his colleagues at CERN, and it wasn’t really until 1993, when the Mosaic browser was released, that the Internet started to take off. As best as we can say, this was the genesis of the Internet, the moment the whole thing went live, so it’s well worth celebrating.
12 August 1981 – IBM PC
IBM released its Personal Computer Model 5150 on 12 August 1981.
It cost a princely $1,265 and that was without a monitor or hard disk.
Still what a machine, and what a future it went on to create.
27 July 1981 – MS-DOS
On July 27 1981, Microsoft bought DOS from Seattle Computer Products for $75,000. The rest, as they say, is history.
MS-DOS was unleashed on the World in 1982, was the foundation of Windows and helped make Bill Gates the richest person in history.
