Steven Pemberton
I was asked if it were possible that the CWI website was amongst the first 5000 websites.
You should remember that when the web started there was little idea that this was going to be a historic event (the same can be said for the start of the internet here in 1988). As a result, we didn't particularly keep records, or screen dumps, or anything like that.
I knew that the CWI website was first running sometime in 1993 or early 1994. Luckily I still have all my email from then, and a quick search revealed that the first email I had received that mentioned the CWI URL was from mid-November 1993. I remember receiving that email, and know that when I read it the site had already been up for a time, but at least it gives us an upper-bound.
The following webpage gives data from a web-crawler of the period, and gives the number of websites in the period June 1993-December 1994: https://stuff.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html
From it we see that at the given dates, there were the following number of sites:
| Month | Number of sites |
|---|---|
| June 1993 | 130 |
| December 1993 | 623 |
| June 1994 | 2738 |
| December 1994 | 10022 |
If we draw a graph of this using a log scale, we see this:
which demonstrates a pretty convincing exponential function.
Calculating the doubling times, and monthly growth for these values we get:
| Period | Doubling time (months) |
Monthly growth |
|---|---|---|
| June-December 1993 | 2.654 | 29.8% |
| December 1993-June 1994 | 2.809 | 27.98% |
| June - December 1994 | 3.205 | 24.1% |
Interpolating for the first six months of this period:
| Month | Sites |
|---|---|
| June | 130 |
| July | 169 |
| August | 219 |
| September | 285 |
| October | 370 |
| November | 480 |
| December | 623 |
From which I conclude that the CWI website was easily amongst at least the first 500 websites.