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Read · The web · 3 min

What was the first website, and can you still visit it?

Yes, you can. It lives at info.cern.ch, and it looks exactly the way you would expect a page from the early 1990s to look: black text on a white background, blue links, and nothing else.

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN (the physics laboratory near Geneva), wrote a proposal for a system that would let researchers share documents linked to one another. By the end of 1990 he had the first web server and the first browser running on his NeXT computer. In August 1991 he announced the software on internet newsgroups, and people outside CERN began to join in.

The first website was about the web itself. It explained what hypertext was, how to set up your own server, and where to find the few other sites that existed.

To make sure nobody switched that computer off by accident, someone stuck a handwritten label on it, in red ink: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” At the start, it was the only web server in the world.

There is a twist. The page you can visit today is not quite the original. When CERN set out to restore it in 2013, the oldest copy they could find dated from 1992. Then Paul Jones, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, came forward with an older one: a page Berners-Lee had shared with him in 1991, which he had carried from server to server for more than twenty years.

The decision that mattered most came on 30 April 1993, when CERN made the web software available royalty-free. Anyone could use it, and nobody had to ask permission. By late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers. By the end of 1994 there were about 10,000. By the end of 1996 there were about 250,000, including RogerLe.com, created in October 1996.

And today? That number deserves a question of its own.

Sources

  1. CERN, A short history of the Web · home.cern
  2. CERN, The birth of the Web · home.cern
  3. CERN, http://info.cern.ch (the first website and the line-mode simulator) · info.cern.ch
  4. CERN Document Server, replica of the label on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer · cds.cern.ch
  5. W3C Web History Community Group, Restoring the first website (2013) · w3.org
  6. Internet Live Stats, Total number of websites (1996 figure, based on Netcraft and Matthew Gray of MIT) · internetlivestats.com
  7. WUNC, Hunt for the first web page leads to UNC-Chapel Hill (12 June 2013) · wunc.org