CERN Celebrates 20th Anniversary of the World Wide Web with Restoration of First Ever Website

Millions of Internet users today are probably unaware of the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. On April 30, 1993, CERN made the technology available to the world for free. CERN also known by its English name, The European Organization for Nuclear Research was convinced by the inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee to make the software used to run a Web server available to everyone royalty-free.

Research benefiting our lives

CERN’s headquarters is located in Geneva, Switzerland. The Director-General of this bastion of experimental research Rolf Heuer said that the Web, an “invention in a physics laboratory,” has transformed our society and has reshaped the way by which education, research and business are being conducted. The Web has been instrumental in influencing and changing the way that we live. He reiterated that the World Wide Web is the best example of how basic research is benefitting humankind.

Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee

What was initially called W3 (short for “World Wide Web”) was the creation of Tim Berners-Lee a physicist from the United Kingdom. He also gave the technology the name by which it is known today. In 1989 when it was created, the original purpose of the Web was to inter-connect scientist who were located at many different universities as well as institutes they were working with. The Web was intended to facilitate faster communication and more efficient means of communication. At that time, Berners-Lee’s supervisor made a note on the proposal. It said, “Vague, but exciting.”

Into the public domain

The statement that put World Wide Web technology out into the world and free for everyone to use read, “CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it.” Nowadays, an estimated 630 million websites exist.

Humble beginnings

The first ever website was not as complex as what we have today. But it was clearly a portent of the amazing things that were to come. And in celebration of two decades of unparalleled utility, CERN has brought together a team that is tasked to recreate a working version of the first website ever put up and a set of guidelines that goes with it.

When that first website was put up its main function was in support of the Web project. The website described how to set up a server and how to use the Web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s computer at CERN served as the host. This particular NeXt computer (developed by a company founded by pre-Apple Steve Jobs) is still at CERN but the first website is not hosted there anymore.

One for the books

CERN has restored and republished the first website in celebration of 10 years of public access to the Web. The first ever Web address is http://info.cern.ch. The team has worked on this first URL and so far the earliest files were restored and the first ever website is now a home for information about the important events that shaped the Web’s earliest days.