Talk:List of websites founded before 1995

Guidelines for Inclusion
This page is a bit of an oddball in the Wikipedia realm, and I'm going to suggest some particular guidelines for it that go above and beyond what other Wikipedia typically uses. This is because this page is particularly prone to advertising attempts. It also seems to be particularly prone to a website's own description offered as a reliable source, sometimes pulled directly from the website, and sometimes pulled from promotional materials that have been reported by the press. And it seems to be prone to misunderstandings of what is meant by "website".

The page itself lists three criteria for inclusion, which do NOT all have to be met.
 * They still exist (albeit in some cases with different names).
 * They made contributions to the history of the World Wide Web.
 * They helped to shape certain modern Web content, such as webcomics and weblogs.

Clearly, a complete list of all websites founded before 1995 is not feasible. The goal of this page is to list websites that are in some sense notable. Based on this, I'll add one more item that I feel should be required for inclusion, and is perhaps more important than others:
 * It had to be reasonably well-known by 1995.

This means that we need to have some source that demonstrates that the website in question was actually in use. A website's own "History" or "About" page is NOT sufficient. As it happens there's a relatively short list of acceptable sources that seem to come up repeatedly in this particular context:
 * A published article in a newspaper or magazine, ideally before 1995 (care should be taken with modern articles that might merely be news coverage of website publicity).
 * Mention in NCSA What's New pages before 1995.
 * Mention somewhere on USENET before 1995
 * Mention on the www-talk mailing list before 1995
 * Mention on some other significant and topically related mailing list before 1995

If a website can't meet any of these criteria, it probably didn't exist at all, and even if it did and no one anywhere was talking about it, then it wasn't notable.

I also want to cover what a website is:
 * A domain name is NOT a website. You can't simply look at the domain name registration to see when the website came online.  Today, there is almost a perfect correlation between websites and domain names, but in the early 1990s, domains were primarily registered just for email.
 * A gopher site is NOT a website. Gopher had no hypertext abilities built in.
 * An ftp site is NOT a website. However, FTP sites COULD serve HTML documents in a way that SOME browsers could handle as if it was a web server.  So extra attention needs to be given if it turns out that the earliest server was an FTP server.  If it was serving plain documents, then it is not a website.  But if it is serving a web of interconnected HTML files, it MAY be considered to be a website.
 * Ideally, a new website came online before 1995 with its modern domain name but this is NOT a requirement. Many sites started as a subtree on some educational sites.  Based on the way NCSA What's New covered this, and the way people spoke about websites in online forums, it's clear that a topical subtree of a larger site was very often viewed as a separate site, and we should honor that.  But we should be careful.  The standard should be the same - that subtree should have been notable on its own (that is, not merely a part of the parent website) before 1995.

This is just intended as a starting point for discussion. Let me know if you feel this goes too far, or not far enough, or if I've left out any issues.Battling McGook (talk) 16:17, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

History of Websites by DATE and Cited?
Can we please make sure we are listing this by Websites, and not "Web servers"? Saying "Second web server" might or might not mean that, then especially, but not today. And please list them by date, giving the actual dates, with CITATIONS for the sources of those dates? Thank you! Misty MH (talk) 18:24, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
 * This may help as a source: History of the World Wide Web at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web —Retrieved June 1, 2021. Misty MH (talk) 18:26, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Hi, operator and co-owner of LSD.com. If I can suggest a few things to better organize this page for everyone:

Simple citation on end of a sentence with Date claimed like this, [|[50]] I would be willing to contribute to this if page was reduced down as previously noted. 10,000 entries is excessive. Cheers.
 * Organize by date.
 * Citation to WHOIS for registration date.
 * Wiki link as header to site if active. (I know, LSD.com has no Wiki yet)
 * Citation to wayback machine earliest crawl.
 * Probably should restrict to December 31, 1994 and before.

Oslo.net
Suggestion to add www.oslo.net to the list. This was Norways first Internet Service Provider, created in 1991 and launched in 1993. They covered the 1994 winter olympics, i.e. the first real time Internet coverage of an Olympic event. In 1995, they launched the search engine Kvasir, which is still in operation.

Oslonett already has Wikipedia pages with sources, so this should be fairly easy to verify. 90.143.20.53 (talk) 07:10, 26 October 2022 (UTC)


 * As I understand it, this is a list of websites and does not include service providers. Rublamb (talk) 04:44, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Not significant enough for article
Based on the criteria outlined above, I am removing the following websites from the article because they lack independent sources or a Wikipedia article. They can be restored to the article once sources are found or when it has an article in Wikipedia. Rublamb (talk) 06:14, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Traditio.com (1994) was founded on September 29, 1994, as an independent voice and virtual encyclopaedia of traditional Roman Catholocism. It was also the first web site for traditional Roman Calocism.
 * Stak Trading or staktrading.co.uk (1994) is a computer hardware resale website in the United Kingdom. The site was created by Stuart Mackintosh and is still live at www.stak.com/.
 * Steelforge.com (1994) is a commercial website for open die forge facility. It is still live.
 * Sighting.com or SIGHTINGS began in 1994 as the website for Jeff Rense's award-winning UFO and paranormal radio program of the same name. It is defunct.
 * DeBora Rachelle Inc. (1993) launched its wedding and bridal store website in 1993 as BridesbyDeBora.com. It was later changed to DeBoraRachelle.com, also known as PromDressShop.com.
 * Kent Anthropology One (1993) was one of the first social science sites. It went online in May 1993.
 * First Virtual went online in October 1994 and was the first cyberbank.
 * EPage Classifieds was the first Web classified ad site. It went online in October 1994 at ep.com.
 * Enterzone was the first purely Web-based (no Gopher) literary webzine. It was published at enterzone.berkeley.edu and went online in December 1994.
 * Home Page Replica (1994) was a fansite dedicated to researching the history and music of Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band.
 * In April 1994, David Price of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford announced rsl.ox.ac.uk/isca as a web version of a previous Gopher server. No version of this website was archived.
 * MIT IHTFP Hack Gallery is a website dedicated to cataloging Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In continuous operation since 1994, it is accessible at hacks.mit.edu
 * Online Technology Exchange, Inc. (1994) created Onlinetechex.com, the largest worldwide searchable database of electronic components and semiconductor parts. This site is still active.
 * On January 4, 1994, the Radcliffe Science Library was the first part of the University of Oxford to establish a web presence at rsl.ox.ac.uk/.

JumpStation and ALIWeb can't BOTH be the 1st search engine. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 185.65.111.214 (talk) 13:21, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Number of websites in 1992 - conflicting information
The introduction to this article has a sentence that reads, "By the end of 1992, there were ten websites." The introduction to the 1992 section has a sentence that reads, "Near the end of 1992, there were fifty to sixty websites, according to a robot web crawl by Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica researcher Guido van Rossum." These two sentences appear to be contradictory. 2601:600:9480:500:80C2:73:484A:3BDD (talk) 11:24, 15 May 2024 (UTC)