The world’s first website, First public website went online 25 years ago

It was available to the public. The website was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which was a basic text page with hyperlinks which connected visitors to other pages.

Berners-Lee used the public launch to outline his plan for the service, which would ended up dominating the twenty-first century.

“The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful worldwide information system,” said Berners-Lee on the world’s first public website. “The project which began with the philosophy that academic information should be freely available to anyone.”

Berners-Lee wanted the World Wide Web to be a place where people could share information and knowledge across the world through documents & links navigated with a simple search function.

The Next computer
The Next computer which Sir Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web is still housed at CERN headquarters

The first step to making that a reality happened on 6th August, 1991, and was hailed with little fanfare when Berners-Lee launched the

first web page from his Next computer at CERN’s headquarters in Geneva.

Kept safe at http://info.cern.ch, the founding website contained basic instructions on how the web worked,

including how to access documents & set up your own server. CERN reinstated the page at it’s original address in 2013.

Worlds first websiteWorlds first websitethe worlds first website

The web was initially only available to the CERN employees. But just over two weeks later it was made publicly available for anyone, anywhere who had a computer to see and add to. As a result, we now have a dedicated day which is called “Internaut Day” – a portmanteau of “internet” and “astronaut” that celebrates the first ever steps taken online.

The genesis of the web

Another date which is celebrated as the birth of the World Wide Web is March 12, 1989, the day Berners-Lee published his proposal for what he then called “Information Management”.

Which was primarily a business proposal, Berners-Lee conceived of the web being a way to prevent information loss in business and the scientific community.

At the time, he was working as a computer programmer at CERN’s European Organisation for Nuclear Research, where he’d seen countless amounts of data lost due to high staff turnover and poor communication.

He looked on as researchers wasted weeks solving problems only to find out it had been resolved years earlier.

“The problems of the information loss may have been particularly a discomforting situation at CERN, but in this case,CERN is a model in miniature of the rest of the world in a few years time. CERN meets now some of the problems which the rest of the world will have to face soon,” said Berners-Lee.

CERN is a miniature model of the rest of the world in a few years time.

CERN now meets some of the problems which the rest of the world will soon have to face,” said Berners-Lee.

His solution was a “universal linked information system” in which a network of documents linked to one another in a simple way that anyone could navigate to find exactly what they want or need.

Berners-Lee’s boss at CERN, Mike Sendall, wrote a note on the proposal: “Vague but exciting”, before giving it his approval.

the worlds first website

First website which was seen through an interface that mimics the early Line Mode Browser written by Nicola Pellow CREDIT: CERN

Within a year & a half, just before Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built the infrastructure for the web and designed the first web page.

He wrote the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which explained how information would travel to and from computers, and hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which was used to create the first web pages.

and hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which was used to create the first web pages.

He also wrote the text for the first website that described the project and how others could get involved.

The site went live on August 6, 1991, and was housed on Berners-Lees’ Next computer, the first server,

which had a note taped to the front that said: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN”.

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The first picture published on the World Wide Web was uploaded in 1992
One of the first practical uses of Berners-Lee’s creation was an internal phone book for CERN employees, which Bernd Pollermann uploaded soon after it went live.

On August 23, 1991, the web was made available to everyone around the world. Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited Berners-Lee the next month and was so interested in the project that he took a copy of the software to California and four months later launched the first web server.

The following year, the first picture was uploaded to the web: a kitsch image of CERN’s all-female parody pop band Les Horribles Cernettes.

In 1993, the World Wide Web was made publicly available through an open licence, meaning anybody could run a server and build sites. As a result, a library of material soon amassed and early competitors, such as University of Minnesota’s paid-for Gopher, were stamped out.

The same year saw the release of the elegant Mosaic browser, and the first ever World Wide Web conference, known as the “Woodstock of the web”, at CERN.

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Berners-Lee’s first browser in 1993 CREDIT: CERN
The next phase

A quarter of a century later, the web is dominated by social networks, search engines and online shopping sites. It has evolved beyond static web pages, and is now made up of interactive sites coded in new languages, and packed with photos, videos and moving parts.

From here, we can expect the web to continue to leak from the computer screen into the real world, with the rise of the internet of things, biometric logins and superfast connection speeds hailing a new era for the World Wide Web.

The birth of the World Wide Web

1960s

The term ‘online’ is coined for the first time

Doug Engelbart prototypes an “oNLine System” (NLS) which does hypertext browsing editing, email, and so on. He invents the mouse for this purpose. Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext in A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate. 1965. See also: Literary Machines.

Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS in 1967.

1980

The seeds are sown

While consulting for CERN June-December of 1980, scientist Tim Berners-Lee writes a notebook program, ‘Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything’, which allows links to be made between arbitrary nodes.

Each node had a title, a type, and a list of bidirectional typed links. “ENQUIRE” ran on Norsk Data machines under SINTRAN-III.

12 March 1989

Tim Berners-Lee submits a proposal for a distributed information system at CERN

Berners-Lee writes a proposal to develop a distributed information system for the laboratory. “Vague, but exciting” was the comment that his supervisor, Mike Sendall, wrote on the cover, and with those words, gave the green light.

20 December 1990

The world’s first website goes live at CERN

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had defined the Web’s basic concepts, the URL, http and html, and he had written the first browser and server software.

Info.cern.ch was the address of the world’s first website and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN.

The site centred on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information.

10 January 1991

The web extends to the high-energy-physics community

"First Web Server" by (Coolcaesar )
In 1991, an early WWW system was released to the high-energy-physics community via the CERN program library. It included the simple browser, web server software and a library, implementing the essential functions for developers to build their own software. A wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. A little later it was made generally available via the internet, especially to the community of people working on hypertext systems.

6 August 1991

Berners-Lee posts a summary of the project

Berners-Lee posts a summary of the project on several internet newsgroups, including alt.hypertext, which a site for hypertext enthusiasts. The move marked the debut of the web as a publicly available service on the internet.

12 December 1991

The web pitches up in the US

The first web server outside of Europe was installed on 12 December 1991 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released its Mosaic browser, which was easy to run and install on ordinary PCs and Macintosh computers.

The steady trickle of new websites became a flood. The world’s First International World-Wide Web conference, held at CERN in May, was hailed as the “Woodstock of the web”.

30 April 1993

CERN gives away the WorldWideWeb source code

CERN issued a statement putting the Web into the public domain, ensuring that it would remain an open standard.

The organisation released the source code of Berners-Lee’s hypertext project, WorldWideWeb, into the public domain the same day. WorldWideWeb became free software, available to all.

The move had an immediate effect on the spread of the web. By late 1993 there are over 500 known web servers, and the web accounts for 1 per cent of internet traffic.

Berners-Lee moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from where he still runs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

June 1995

Exponential growth

The graph above shows the load on the first Web server (info.cern.ch) which was1000 times what it has been theree years earlier.

By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers – of which 2000 were commercial – and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the collected works of Shakespeare every second.

1 October 1994

Berners-Lee founds the World Wide Web Consortium

In October 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory for computer science – in collaboration with CERN and with support from DARPA and the European Commission.