The History of Websites (1945–2026): The Full, Ridiculous Story

▶ Aspire Builder Pro, my white-labeled GoHighLevel for health & wellness businesses: https://aspirebuilderpro.com ▶ Try GoHighLevel free (affiliate link, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you): https://www.gohighlevel.com/?fp_ref=l... In 1990, the entire World Wide Web ran on one computer at CERN. It had a sticker on it: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" Today there are about 1.5 billion websites. This is how we got from one to the other. This is the full history of websites, from Vannevar Bush's 1945 dream machine to AI that builds a site in a minute. It covers ARPANET's first message (it was "lo", because the system crashed), the coffee pot that became the first webcam, the blink tag, the Space Jam website that's still online, the Hampster Dance, Pets.com and the dot-com crash, MySpace Tom, the Million Dollar Homepage, Internet Explorer's actual gravestone, and the week Google told people to eat rocks. Every fact has been researched and sourced. The sources are listed in the end credits. This video is sponsored by Aspire Builder Pro, my own company. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open: the first banner ad 1:18 The History of Websites 1:40 Part 1: The Dream 3:34 The Mother of All Demos 4:44 ARPANET and the first message: lo 6:44 Email, the @ sign and the first .com 8:25 Bulletin boards, AOL and HyperCard 10:31 Tim Berners-Lee invents the Web 12:57 The coffee pot webcam 14:06 The Web is given away; Mosaic 15:51 Yahoo, Netscape and the blink tag 17:11 The first online sale and banner ad 17:59 1995: craigslist, JavaScript, Amazon, eBay 19:41 The Netscape IPO 20:35 Part 2: The Wild Web 21:46 GeoCities and webrings 23:19 Space Jam and Hotmail 24:32 CSS, Flash and the Hampster Dance 26:36 The browser war 28:03 Search engines and Google 30:04 The dot-com bubble and crash 32:47 Blogs, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive 34:08 WordPress and Squarespace 34:32 Friendster, MySpace, Facebook 36:33 Web 2.0, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter 37:56 The Million Dollar Homepage 38:55 iPhone, Chrome and the end of GeoCities 41:16 Part 3: Everyone Gets a Website 42:11 Responsive design and Mobilegeddon 43:28 Heavier than Doom 44:08 HTTPS, cookie banners, IE's funeral 45:44 WordPress, Wix and Shopify 47:05 Funnels 47:40 HighLevel and white labeling 49:26 ChatGPT and AI 50:28 1.5 billion websites and link rot 52:09 Five lessons 53:10 Where we are now 54:47 Credits & sources 📚 KEY SOURCES Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (The Atlantic, 1945) · CERN: the birth of the Web, info.cern.ch, and the 1993 public-domain statement · Tim Berners-Lee, "Information Management: A Proposal" (1989) · W3C · Matthew Gray, MIT web growth survey · Internet Archive & Archive Team · Pew Research Center, "When Online Content Disappears" (2024) · HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025 · Netcraft Web Server Survey (July 2026) · Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief (Q2 2026) · ITU Facts and Figures 2025 · StatCounter · W3Techs · Let's Encrypt · Steve Jobs, "Thoughts on Flash" (2010) · Ethan Marcotte, "Responsive Web Design" (A List Apart, 2010) · HighLevel company announcements and interviews. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons under their listed licenses (full credits are at the end of the video). Logos and trademarks belong to their owners. Scenes labeled "illustration" are recreations. #HistoryOfTheInternet #WebHistory #WebDesign