20 years ago today, humanity was given
the greatest gift of all: The World Wide
Web
In a few short years the web has become so familiar that it is hard to think of life without it.
Along with that familiarity with browsers and bookmarks goes a little knowledge about the web's history.
Many users know that Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the web at the Cern physics laboratory near Geneva .
But few will know the details of the world wide web's growth - not least because the definitive history of how that happened has yet to be written.
Zero to hero
One key date is 6 August 1991 - the day on which links to the fledgling computer code for the www were put on the alt.hypertext discussion group so others could download it and play with it.
On that day the web went world wide.
Jeff Groff, who worked with Mr Berners-Lee on the early code, said a very simple idea was behind the web.
"The vision was that people should not have to deal with the technology stuff," he said.
The web was an overlay that tried to hide the underlying complexity of the data and documents proliferating on the internet.
Early on this commitment to simplicity meant that the now familiar addresses beginning http:// were never seen.
In the early 90s a single way to get at the information stored on many different computers was very attractive, said Paul Kunz, a staff scientist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Slac) who set up the first web server outside Europe in December 1991.
At that time, he said, computers were islands of information. A login only gave access to that machine's resources. Switching computers meant logging in again and probably using a different set of commands to find and retrieve data.
The web really caught Mr Kunz's interest after Tim Berners-Lee showed it querying a database of physics papers held on an IBM mainframe.
"I knew what the results should look like on the screen and the results looked identical in the web browser," said Mr Kunz.
The web server set up by Mr Kunz let physicists trawl through the 200,000 abstracts more easily than ever before.
This proved so useful that soon even Cern scientists were querying the database via the Slac webpage rather than using the copy on their network.
The Internet’s humble beginnings
From 1989 to the following year, Berners-Lee along with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau wrote and developed a proposal outlining the use of a global hypertext system, which would later on be referred to as the World Wide Web. In the proposal, terms pertaining to the use of the web were identified, including the way a web of hypertext documents (what we now know as HTML) could be viewed by browsers. In late 1990, demonstrations of their project’s prototype began. Since the project was originally intended to make information dissemination between scientists stationed in various locations around the world easier, an interface was developed on NeXT computers and applied so that people within CERN would be encouraged to use and test it out themselves. To this day, the original NeXT computer is on display at the Microcosm exhibit in Switzerland. According to CERN, it still bears the handwritten label that says, “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”
Web in the 90s
Where we are now
Where we are now
As it was, only a select few had complete access to the NeXT computer that ran the first-ever browser. In 1991, CERN proceeded to develop a basic browser that could run on any system or computer. Complete with software, library, and functions that allowed other developers to modify the browser according to their needs, the new WWW system was quickly implemented by various schools and research centers.
The first Web server finally reached the U.S. and came online in 1991 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. By that time, two versions of the browser were available – to further develop the newer one, Berners-Lee took to the Internet to reach out to other developers who would like to contribute. Quite a few were successful, the most notable one being the Mosaic, the very first graphical browser released by Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina, and others at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. This browser, along with the Web, gained media attention – the corporation founded to back it up would later on be known as Netscape. In April 1993, CERN made the decision to make the Web protocol and code available for everyone to use, partly to usurp other institutions’ plans to charge for it in the future.
Since then, people’s exposure to the World Wide Web just kept growing. In 1994, 2 million computers were connected to the Internet and were specifically intended for academic use only; in 2012, there were 2.4 billion Internet users worldwide, from all walks of life. Radio stations, newspapers, book stores, and search engines began infiltrating Web space. Blogging started becoming a global phenomenon. The dot-com market rose then crashed again. Google started becoming a household name, alongside Wikipedia. iPods were released. File-sharing services were founded. Billions of webpages were created and visited on a daily basis, one of them being MySpace. Soon it was Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. After 10 years of being available to the general public, the World Wide Web began seeing the development of more online and portable technology, and more households were able to access highspeed Internet access that was available 24/7. People started turning to the Internet for entertainment purposes, which used to be exclusive to television. The rest is – as cliché as it sounds – history. And it’s only getting better.
As a tribute to the 20 years we’ve all experienced connected to the Internet and an even bigger part of their initiative to restore digital treasures associate with the birth of the Web, CERN has decided to bring all of us back to the World Wide Web’s roots and republish an updated version of the very first web page address, http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Compared to the visually graphic and cleverly designed websites that recently won at the Webby Awards, it’s pretty plain and simple – but it’s definitely a clear sign of just how much the Internet has evolved.
The World Wide Web, invented at CERN in 1989 by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, has grown to revolutionize communications worldwide
Where the web was born
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather a focus for an extensive community that includes more than 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries. Although they typically spend some time on the CERN site, the scientists usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Good contact is therefore essential.
The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.
How the web began
Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web [PDF] at CERN in 1989, further refining the proposal with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau the following year. On 12 November 1990 the pair published a formal proposal outlining principal concepts and defining important terms behind the web. The document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" in which a "web" of "hypertext documents" could be viewed by “browsers”.
By the end of 1990, prototype software for a basic web system was already being demonstrated. An interface was provided to encourage its adoption, and applied to the CERN computer centre's documentation, its help service and Usenet newsgroups; concepts already familiar to people at CERN. The first examples of this interface were developed on NeXT computers.
Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first website and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was
which 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. There are no screenshots of this original page and, in any case, changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed. See a later copy (from 1993).
You can see the orginal NeXT computer at the Microcosm exhibit at CERN, still bearing the label, hand-written in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
The web extends
The first web servers were all located in European physics laboratories. Only a few users had access to the NeXT computer platform on which the first browser ran, but CERN soon provided a much simpler browser, which could run on any system.
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, and implemented the essential functions for developers to build their own software. A wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use the system. A little later it was made generally available via the internet, especially to the community of people working on hypertext systems.
Going global
The first web server in the US came online in December 1991, once again in a particle physics laboratory: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center(SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, which was sophisticated but available only on NeXT machines. The other was the “line-mode” browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the internet for other developers to join in. Several individuals wrote browsers, mostly for the X-Window System. The most notable from this era are MIDAS by Tony Johnson from SLAC, Viola by Pei Wei from technical publisher O'Reilly Books, and Erwise by Finnish students from Helsinki University of Technology.
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| Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web |
Twenty years ago today, the organization that created the World Wide Web made its underlying technology available to everyone on a royalty-free basis. To commemorate that occasion, the very first website is now back online at its original URL.
Physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1989 at CERN, the European nuclear research and particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. CERN didn't try to keep the technology to itself. The Web became publicly accessible on Aug. 6, 1991, and "[o]n 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web ('W3', or simply 'the web') technology available on a royalty-free basis," the organization wrote today. "By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish."
Snapshots of the original website were preserved, but not the site itself at its original URL, until now. "Although the NeXT machine—the original web server—is still at CERN, sadly the world's first website is no longer online at its original address," CERN wrote. CERN is now fixing that oversight, with the first site back online at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Previously, that URL simply redirected to http://info.cern.ch. Here's what it looks like now:
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