What was the first web page hosted in India? 

I would need an image or the url.

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Request for Question Clarification by onlinexpert-ga on 15 Jul 2002 08:15 PDT

Hi chilebean-ga 

Do you want to know the first webpage hosted from India OR first
webpage hosted in any Indian Server?

Regards
OnlinExperT

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Clarification of Question by chilebean-ga on 15 Jul 2002 11:34 PDT

Yes, a webpage hosted from an Indian server.

Hi chilebean,

   As a resident of India, I can help you with this. Internet hit the
Indian scene on August 15, 1995, the 49th independence day. The first
website to be hosted from India is the VSNL (Videsh Sanchar Nigam
Limited) website, the first ISP.

VSNL
http://www.vsnl.net.in

The oldest version I can find of it is a Nov 30, 1996 version, which
can be found here:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961130001529/http://www.vsnl.net.in/

NIC (National Informatics Centre) followed soon
http://www.nic.in
Theres a Nov 12, 1996 version here:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961112211402/http://www.nic.in/

I hope this answers your question. Please ask a clarification if you
have one.

Cheers,
aditya2k

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Clarification of Answer by aditya2k-ga on 16 Jul 2002 09:33 PDT

Hi,

  I'm posting this as a clarification to a comment made by zeroone-ga.

  ERNET initially catered to very few universities (like the IITs). It
provided services like e-mail, FTP and gopher. There were no web
pages. Data was stored as ascii files (txt etc..).
  
  I'm sure the question asker wants to know about "webpages" and not
just data stored in electronic form.

  Furthermore, regarding "Source: DoE (updated on 29th March '95)",
the link points to gopher://mahavir.doe.ernet.in/00/ernet/sites/ ,
which is gopher.

  I stand by my answer.

Cheers,
aditya2k

For any researchers wanting to answer this question, here's a link to
a historical page showing all known web servers, dated sometime
between 1992 and 1995 (can't see the exact date here):

http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html

There are no Indian sites on the list, but if you can find the exact
date, you'll have a good guess at where to start the search, anyway.

Somewhere on the site, there also used to be a list of all known
webpages, although I can't find it right now. (At least, I remember it
being there. There were only a couple of dozen pages listed.)

Good luck.

Hi Chilebean

Well, I am of the knowledge that before VSNL started Internet in
India, some universities already had access to the net(ERNET) and they
had some pages hosted on their server too. Chilebean, I did some
research on this and found some text and page which might help.

You can check out the About Us section from this page
http://www.eis.ernet.in/

Then, you may want to check this page
http://theory.tifr.res.in/misc/ernet-3-95/

This page claims the content was sourced from 
Source: DoE (updated on 29th March '95) - the date before the launch
of VSNL net on Aug 15, 1995.

Follow some links from this page and you might get some info
http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnl.html

My knowledge is that ERNET had some pages hosted on their server
before the launch of VSNL net in Aug 1995. Though, Aditya is right,
the commercial launch of Internet was on Aug 15, 1995.

Please give me your feedback if this helped you. Thanks. :)

Regards
ZeroOne