#“20 Years of WWW - I think I started in 1995 with RTEMS”
Today is the 20th anniversary of the web. Pretty incredible 20 years really. My own history of the internet was finding Usenet in 1990 when I started my Masters in UCD, followed by email, FTP.FUNET.FI, Gopher, WAIS and the joy of downloadable shareware. There was then a pause from 92-94 as I worked on GSM basestation software in S3 and only had email. Ever resourceful, we then discovered FTP-by-email. Yes it was as clunky as it sounds but it bloody worked.
At the start of 1995 I was put in charge of an incredibly cool software project - to build the embedded software for Philip's first generation of MPEG-2 decoders. One of the requirements was to use a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). Now this is proper Real-Time, not Twitter Real-Time. When you are decoding video, "best effort" is not good enough, you have no wiggle room when it comes to managing a transport stream with a 24Mhz CPU.
My boss at the time mentioned the Web, which I was vaguely aware of as a sort of tarted-up Gopher. He has Mosaic installed on his PC and a modem attached to that. The only access point in the entire company! He showed me some directory site (possibly Yahoo, but not sure) and I went digging. I also re-discovered Usenet and what a wonderful wealth of information it had. Actually I think you can call Usenet the Twitter of its day. It was the fastest most efficient way to get an answer to a technical question for years. Of course I can still search back on posts from 1995 thanks to Google. Try that in 2028 for this year's Tweets.
Somehow I found RTEMS, the Real-Time Executive for Missile Systems, renamed to the more palatable Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems. It was an OS developed for the US Army Missile Command in Alabama and was fully Open Source. It was also compatible with the Philips P90CE201 variant of the 68000 embedded CPU we were using. I won't bore you with the details of compiling GCC cross-compilers on VAX but we had an interesting few months with RTEMS (and got a kick out of using a Missile OS in a Set Top Box). The attached screenshot from WaybackMachine from 1998 looks close to the one in 1995.
So in my mind the RTEMS site is the first real site I visited on the Web. Any idea what your's was?