History of The WDVL

• The project started as a hotlist called WebStars on a NASA computer in late 1993, and was moved to Charm Net in 1994 as The CyberWeb.

• It became part of The WWW Virtual Library (originally at CERN) in September 1994.

• The CyberWeb was announced in What's New, October 16, 1994 (528 Kbytes).

• The Stars.com domain name was granted on December 22nd 1994.

• WDVL was acquired by Mecklermedia for its Internet.com family of sites in March 1998.

• I resigned in March 1999, having spent 5 years developing WDVL.

I was one of the first people to collect and publish links to web development resources. It was in 1993, on a NASA computer, on which I established one of NASA's first web servers, and one of the first 300 in the world. As the links list grew larger and larger and became more of a personal hobby (or obsession), I decided to move it to a non-government server. It went briefly to Nyx under the name of The CyberWeb, and thence to Charm Net in Baltimore, where I established Stars.com in 1994.

I left NASA in 1995 to establish a web development company (CyberWeb SoftWare), but found that I could get better, more reliable revenue from banner advertising on WDVL. Initially we (Lucy and I) handled the clients ourselves, but we found that to be a difficult task and so we gladly joined the DoubleClick Network. Mecklermedia acquired the site in March 1998.

WebStars

What's New, February 16,1994

"WebStars: Astrophysics in Cyberspace is for those who are interested in the application of computers & networks -- especially the World-Wide Web -- to support the work of astronomers & astrophysicists"

What's New, April 19 1994

WebStars, at NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center, is about astronomy & astrophysics; cyberspace; data formats; the Space Science Web Group; software & icons downloading; WWW technical pages & style guides; on-line articles about astronomy on the Web; HEASARC/StarTrax Browse and other online services; and virtual reality.

Selected Postings in W3C List Archives

11 Sep 1994

Re: Coordination of the WWW Virtual Library

13 Sep 1994

WWW Virtual Library: WWW Development

15 Sep 1994

Re: Structure v. pages (was Re: HTML+)

2 Oct 1994

Re: News...

27 Oct 1994

Re: LaTeX to HTML converter - is there one?

31 Oct 1994

Finding WWW specs, docs,..

17 Nov 1994

Re: GET FILES

5 Dec 1994

Re: Container vs. Empty Element

6 Dec 1994

Re: WWW Virtual Library listproc

9 Dec 1994

Re: tag embedability pointer?

25 Feb 1995

Ask Dr.Web

3 Mar 1995

Re: Handling form inputs

4 Mar 1995

Re: Teach Yourself HTML in a Week (and Write a Book About it in Eight)

10 Mar 1995

Re: Browsers and syntax errors (Was: Captions for Figures...)

16 Mar 1995

Re: An HTML 3.0 page to cut your browser's teeth on (2)

24 Mar 1995

Re: german squiggly B

2 Apr 1995

Web developer and authoring resource starting points

2 Apr 1995

Re: Web developer and authoring resource starting points

11 Apr 1995

Re: Where get HTML2.0 guide

4 May 1995

Re: WWW/HTML/HTTP Training

25 May 1995

The Web Developer's Library

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