The first website was created on the World Wide Web 20 years ago Tuesday, and to mark the occasion, CERN has booted up the old page again.
The European particle accelerator called CERN created the open Web. The technology was to be something anyone could build without paying licensing or royalty fees.
The open Web was first constructed to allow universities and institutions to share information. Its openness led to the World Wide Web's rapid adoption and development in other fields.
A physicist at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, began developing the World Wide Web in 1989. Several years later, in 1993, CERN published a statement that made the World Wide Web freely available to everyone.
If you'd like to see the very first webpage Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW team ever put online, click on https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
For many years, the URL remained inactive, CERN says in a blog post. The institution was able to find a 1992 copy of what the original page looked like and that's what you see on the site. CERN says it will continue to look for older versions of the first website.
Dan Noyes, the Web manager for CERN's communication group, wrote, "the fact that they called their technology the World Wide Web hints at the fact that they knew they had something special, something big."
Indeed, there is no aspect of society that has not been transformed by the invention, so much so that today the World Wide Web is almost synonym with "the Internet." The impetus behind putting the first website online again is to remind everyone of the fundamental values behind the World Wide Web.
"I want my children to be able to understand the significance of this point in time: the Web is already so ubiquitous — so, well, normal — that one risks failing to see how fundamentally it has changed," Noyes told BBC News. "We are in a unique moment where we can still switch on the first Web server and experience it. We want to document and preserve that."
