Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), an international organization operating the world's largest particle physics laboratory, made the World Wide Web (WWW) technology available on a royalty-free basis. The (web) technology was brought to a bloom through the free availability of the required software needed to run a server freely available along with a basic browser and a library of code.
The WWW technology was however made readily possible by the concerted efforts of a British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee.
Timothy Berners Lee, creator of the World Wide Web
Tim invented the web at CERN in 1989. The project, which Tim named "World Wide Web", was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for information sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world.
Other Information Retrieval (IR) systems using the internet - such as WAIS and Gopher - were available at the time, but the web's simplicity along with the fact that the technology was royalty free led to its rapid adoption and development.
The first ever created website in the world was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server. The website was hosted on Tim's NeXT machine - the original web server - which is still at CERN.
Snapshot of the first ever website
The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web. Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces).
On 30th of April, 2013, CERN in its celebration of twenty years of a free, open web and to mark the anniversary of the publication of the document that made the web technology free for everyone is starting a project to restore the first website and to preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web. In doing this, CERN took a bold step by returning the first ever created website to its original address — http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Just as you view the website itself, also be sure to view the source of the first webpage. You’ll find quite a few things about early HTML that have long since changed — like the use of <HEADER> instead of <HEAD> or the complete absence of a root <HTML> tag. There’s also a trace of Berners-Lee’s famous NeXT machine in the <NEXTID N="55"> tag.
If I could make a comparison, what the first website looked like twenty years ago and what it looks like now, then I wonder what web sites will look like 20 years from today and how will they function.
Hyperia presents with a nostalgic feeling, some of the images that will ignite those golden moments that have now shaped our present lives.
Timothy Lee: The man behind the World Wide Web
Tim Lee (left) with Robert Cailliau(right), inventors of the World Wide Web posing next to the first Web Server, NeXT Computer
The first web Server, Tim Bernee-Lee's NeXT Computer, still located at CERN Office
The first ever website created
Snapshots of the first Web Browser called Nexus
Documents officially putting the World Wide Web on a public domain