Scripting News Hits 15 Year Mark, and Other Really Old Websites

Back in the spring of 1997, Dave Winer launched a website known as Scripting News. It was one of the first sites that would come to be known as weblogs, or simply “blogs.” Mr. Winer is famous for his involvement with the development of blogging, RSS, podcasting and Content Management Systems.

Of course, the real “first blogger” is hard to pin down. While it may have been Winer, Justin Hall’s Links From the Underground, which launched in 1994, is also a contender.

Meanwhile, TidBITS.com is over 21 years old. It wasn’t exactly a blog when it was started in 1990 as an “online newsletter and Web site” about the Macintosh, but it has slowly adopted that format. It’s one of the oldest still-updated websites on the internet.

As for domain names, the first one to be registered with a .com TLD was Symbolics.com, followed shortly by the other 99 oldest domains registered from 1985-1987.

The first website on the first web server ever would, of course, be info.cern.ch. The original page that was hosted there has been replaced over the years, but it’s still something of a historical landmark. Incidentally, the trend of hosting websites on a www subdomain was accidental, and caused by the CERN site.