When the Web Was Young, Remixed

Hacking the First Webpage

With deep and humble apologies to Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues, I took up a challenge by a fellow learner in the Teach the Web Mooc to use Mozilla’s Xray Goggles tool to hack and remix the very first website ever put up on the Internet. The website by the CERN research group had its 20th anniversary the other day (see the original) and I even brought it up on the our interactive board for my students to view and reflect on (they noticed how bland it was with a white background and black text, that there was no advertising, no images or video, and a surprising number mentioned the lack of an embedded Google search button … which I found interesting). I made sure to mention that while the page is simple, it sparked a revolution of how people use technology in a revolutionary way, and changed everything.

That got them thinking.

I hacked the Cern site with the intention of giving it some attitude and being playful, and trying to reference where this simple page might take us (including a cats reference). If I had had more time, I would have messed with the hyperlinks, but I didn’t so I didn’t. It might be an intriguing class activity to have students do the same, reflecting the period that the page was published in. I didn’t do that, but I may keep that one on the backburner a bit.

Read my remixed/hacked version of the first website

Peace (in the hack),
Kevin

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