"first" computer on the internet

[Ethan Dicks]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 10:42:59AM -0700, Fred Cisin wrote:
> > Dan Gahlinger wrote:
> > > wasn't there a point in time around 1994-1996 where you *HAD* to use the "www" for domains, no matter what?
> 
> On Sun, 20 Jul 2008, Eric Smith wrote:
> > No.  It was always a convention for DNS entries, nothing more.  It was
> > always possible for a site to use non-www names for web servers.
> 
> My old teaching [cob]-website was/is
> http://merritt.edu/~fcisin
> It has never been a www.
> But, some demented browsers will connect even with an extraneous www.

Not that this thread needs much help, but in 1995 (hardly any sort of
"first"), I used to serve a small number of text pages from the Amiga
3000 I took with me to Antarctica; it was accessible from all over
the world as http://kumiss.mcmurdo.gov/  This sort of thing is no
longer possible due to changes in rules backed up with a fairly tight
firewall, but once upon a time, it was as easy as getting a name
inserted in our nameserver and firing up something to serve pages.

While it may have been commonplace in the early days of the web to
"require" that a default web server live at www.whatever.com, it was
merely uncommon, not forbidden, to also point whatever.com to the
web server as well (which is now somewhat ordinary).

-ethan

-- 
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S     Current South Pole Weather at 20-Jul-2008 at 19:40 Z
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Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov            http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html