What is Web 1.0? The Past

Web 1.0: We’ve been using the internet for a long time now but does it ever cross your mind what the past of the internet looked like? With no advancements and the visuals, we have right now. Web 1.0 is the term that is used for the earliest version of the internet as it emerged from the older versions of the DARPA which is an abbreviation for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This was the first initiative for the world to be connected to a global network of sharing digital communications. This is what has now evolved and is used for multi-functional purposes.

Internet pages back then were just comprised with just hyperlinks and text formats. No visuals or additional images were present at the time on the web. People used to call it just a read-only web generally and it was not interactive in the slightest way possible. Generally, these web pages were made of static pages that were hosted on web servers that were run by various service providers or by free web hosting services. People used to log on to the web to just read about something and gain knowledge or to get updates on various topics or the current world. Simple linear text chat was a feature that was later introduced to the bulletin board system. It may come off as shocking but, advertisements on web pages were banned at that time.

Also Read: What is a Fuzzy Search?

The internet we know today might be barely associated with Web 1.0 as it has changed to so much more than Web 1.0. The line cannot be drawn to where the era of Web 1.0 ended and the era of Web 2.0 started as all the changes that happened, were very slow yet steady as people felt the need for the internet to be more and more interactive.

Although many corporates have the option of providing various information sources through the means of a web browser, where hundreds and thousands of pages serve every single purpose, the user experiences are rather shared through cellular devices which have operating systems of either iOS or Android.

Web 1.0 generally used very simple HTML languages to form web pages. Read-only-internet was the collection of GeoCities pages that are scattered but yet, users can find them throughout the depth of the internet or archived. The Web 1.0 era taught coders to code and build pages through various types of statements, tags and commands to style, align and create colour schemes for various static content. Then the web development industry started rapidly growing, and as a result, people started using various concepts of web designing on their pages and presenting the website that they have made and have the public attracted to it. Layered languages such as CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets) fuel the group of programmers to be able to learn and code very simple and understand the codes they were working on. With these introductions, the face of the internet did change completely.

A good example to be considered is an e-commerce service. In the Web 1.0 era, just catalogues, through which one can showcase the sets of goods and services that are provided by the advertisement initiating company.

What was Web 1.0 used for?

As we discussed above, Web 1.0 was a read-only web on the internet, we can sum up that web 1,0 was used for none other than just being able to share information about various topics and being able to get updates in the form of news or anything that would just require reading abilities as it wouldn’t remotely have any form of visual content whatsoever.

Sum-Up

Although by the looks of it, it may seem that Web 1.0 has been pretty useless, it was a revolutionary change back in the day and has been the leading footstep for what we know as the internet today. The most information that would be required back in the day would be provided by various means such as newspapers, magazines, and various other pieces of literary works, however, there was no such collection of data that Web 1.0 had provided back in the day. Although Web 1.0 wasn’t necessarily able to unleash the full potential it had, it still managed to create a great bridge between starting of the internet services for means of communication to the Web 2.0 that we know today. Web 1.0 has done enough of its job to be able to help us to transition from it to Web 2.0 which will be discussed in the next article. Hopefully, this helped and gave you the details you were looking for.