Internet trivia
Records from linkoflinks's own live feed, and the story of the web, from the first .com to the heartbeats you see today.
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The story of the web
- 1985 15 March 1985 The first .com
symbolics.com, a computer maker in Massachusetts, registers the first .com address. It is still online today.
Source: Stackscale ↗ - 1989 March 1989 An idea at CERN
Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN in Geneva, writes a proposal for a linked information system. His boss scribbles "Vague but exciting" on it.
Source: CERN, Web@30 ↗ - 1990 December 1990 The first website
info.cern.ch goes live on a NeXT computer, with the first browser and the first web server, all written by Berners-Lee.
Source: CERN, Web@30 ↗ - 1991 6 August 1991 The web is announced
Berners-Lee posts a short summary of the World Wide Web project to the alt.hypertext newsgroup, and invites anyone to join.
Source: CERN ↗ - 12 December 1991 Across the ocean
The first web server outside Europe starts at SLAC, a physics lab in California.
Source: CERN, Web@30 ↗ - 1993 21 April 1993 Pictures on the page
Mosaic 1.0 is released: the browser that showed pictures beside text and made the web easy for everyone.
Source: CERN, Web@30 ↗ - 30 April 1993 Free for all
CERN puts the web software in the public domain. No fees, no permission needed: anyone can build on it.
Source: CERN ↗ - 1994 October 1994 Rules everyone shares
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is founded at MIT, with CERN, to agree on web standards.
Source: CERN, Web@30 ↗ - 1995 15 August 1995 India comes online
VSNL opens public internet access in India on Independence Day.
Source: The Better India ↗ - 2013 June 2013 Certificates in the open
RFC 6962, Certificate Transparency (Ben Laurie, Adam Langley and Emilia Kasper of Google): every security certificate goes into public logs. These are the logs linkoflinks reads.
Source: RFC Editor ↗ - 23 October 2013 New endings
The first new generic endings are added to the internet, beyond .com, .org and .net. Today there are hundreds, from .shop to .dev.
Source: ICANN ↗ - 2015 September 2015 to 12 April 2016 Free certificates for all
Let's Encrypt starts giving security certificates for free. When it leaves beta, it has issued more than 1.7 million certificates for 3.8 million websites.
Source: Let's Encrypt ↗ - 2018 July 2018 "Not secure"
Chrome 68 marks every website without a security certificate as "Not secure".
Source: Chromium Blog ↗ - 2025 End of September 2025 378.5 million names
The world has 378.5 million registered website addresses.
Source: Verisign ↗ - 2026 2026 linkoflinks starts watching
Every new security certificate in the public logs becomes a heartbeat in the live galaxy. Each new website is born on screen, minute by minute.
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