20 Years Later: What First-Ever Website Looked Like
Exactly 20 years ago, the first website ever was published at this address http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee had come up with an idea he thought would help CERN physicists, including himself, transfer and share information contained in the lab computers easily and swiftly.
The Internet already existed, and his idea proposed using such technology to transmit information using hypertext- the most fundamental programming language used to build websites today.
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Hypertext over the Internet would allow users to browse easily between texts saved on the web, or in technical terms, a server. By 1990 Berners-Lee eventually created a browser-editor to perform such activity which he and his collaborators decided to call the WorldWideWeb.
The first ever domain and web server address was info.cern.ch and although no screenshot of the original page exists today, a later copy from 1992 may suggest how it may have looked.
Modifications of the website were abundant with changes to the information it exhibited occurring on a daily basis.
By December 1991, the first server outside of Europe was activated at Stanford. And by November 1992, the number of servers around the world reached 26. By October 1993, that number increased to 200, and in that same year the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign made the web available to people using PCs and Macintoshes, according to CERN.
The WorldWideWeb revolutionized how the world functions today and has made living more comfortable in many ways. Next time you have trouble moving forward, whether helping someone out or not, think about how Tim Berners-Lee’s idea not only helped his colleagues but changed the world.
