First presences on the web, as the archive dates them

1996 — 2006 · THE DOMAIN RECORD, AT POINTER SIZE

The web's local firsts survive as capture dates, and are printed as exactly that: the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine keeps the first surviving copy it crawled of each address, a floor beneath a site's true launch and the hardest evidence the era left. For this city's institutions the archive's floors are these. The University of Notre Dame's nd.edu was captured on November 12, 1996, and Tire Rack's commercial site six days later, on November 18, 1996 — the university and the tire retailer are, on the surviving record, the city's twin first presences on the web. WNDU television's wndu.com follows on December 23, 1996. The city's own government site, at its original address ci.south-bend.in.us, was captured on May 30, 1997; its successor address, southbendin.gov, enters the archive on April 2, 2006. The South Bend Tribune's southbendtribune.com was captured on December 2, 1998. The newspaper's full web course — its launches, redesigns and paywall years under Schurz Communications and, from 2019, GateHouse and Gannett — belongs to this history's newspapers & media pass and is pointed to here, as is the broadcasters'; this entry keeps only the dates. Two cautions print with the table. A first capture proves a site existed by that date, not that it launched then; and the addresses a generation of residents actually typed — the local portals and provider home pages of the dial-up years — are precisely the pages the archive kept worst, which is one more reason the first hour's record, told above, runs thin.

Sources:

1. Internet Archive, Wayback Machine capture index (queried November 2026) — first captures: nd.edu, November 12, 1996; tirerack.com, November 18, 1996; wndu.com, December 23, 1996; ci.south-bend.in.us, May 30, 1997; southbendtribune.com, December 2, 1998; southbendin.gov, April 2, 2006; aunalytics.com, April 22, 2012; trek10.com, November 2013; vennli.com, March 5, 2014.