Browsing the early website
gave an idea about the evolution of web and its terminology. I remember my
first question to SLAC team was, "what was the home page in the 1991?”
They answered, "there was nothing called homepage on this
time” Moreover, they called the first 5 pages deployed on Dec. 1991 as
the core pages, not a website.
On 1991 deployment, default page was the main entry point
as an interface to access two major databases for documents SPIRES and BINLIST. On Aug 1992, they unveiled a new set of pages:
SLAC.html explain s the website itself (first home page), SLACinst.html to
explain SLAC lab itself (first SLAC about page), and a set of specific
databases interfaces for Conference, Bibliography. We even found the first
under construction page SLACvoid.html
By the beginning of 1994,
the web pages contained more resources, especially images. SLAC.html at Jan 4,
1994 has the first SLAC logo, unfortunately the logo
was on .xbm format, which most of the modern browsers will not show it
correctly. The 1995 deployment was a huge step in the evolution of the web at
SLAC. They divided the homepage into three homepages: Welcome, Highlighted, and
Detailed that supposed to serve different type of details for web surfers. With
the hardware upgrade to Unix server, they were able to serve pages directly
from the file system. If affects the URL terminology in this time, instead of
serving one level pages /FIND/pagename.html, they served the pages in
hierarchal format. However, it is something we know by nature nowadays, they
had to write tutorial to explain the new system to the WWW users.
Even the management of
access rights has been changed. While I was working in the restoration, I found
uncommon URL patterns /slaconly/. After some investigation, I discovered this
was the way they restricted the access to the website within SLAC network. I’ve
to exclude these pages because it was not authorized for public.
The restoration process
started with a set of scattered files with little metadata about the date for
each file. We used the search engines, Internet Archive, old publications, and
even interviewed the early website developer to define the URI for each page
and how it is linked to each other. I wrote a comprehensive technical blog
about the methodology of the restoration process on secrets of the restoration
of SLAC dead website from the computer cemetery to live Web.
Unfortunately, we were not able to restore the backend-service itself as it is
beyond the scope of web archiving service.
I enjoyed working and
studying this archive that gave me an insight of how the web started and how it
evolved so quickly to be a vital part of our life.
