World’s first web page to be reborn

GENEVA - Agence France-Presse

This photo shows a copy of the world’s first web page 20 years ago. AFP photo

The world’s first web page will be dragged out of cyberspace and restored for today’s Internet browsers as part of a project to celebrate 20 years of the Web, organizers said on April 30.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had begun recreating the website that launched that World Wide Web, as well as the hardware that made the groundbreaking technology possible.

The world’s first website was about the technology itself, according to CERN, allowing
early browsers to learn about the new system and create their own web pages.

Origin of the Web

The project will allow future generations to understand the origin and importance of the Web and its impact on modern life, CERN web manager Dan Noyes told AFP. “We’re going to put these things back in place, so that a web developer or someone who’s interested 100 years from now can read the first documentation that came out from the World Wide Web team,” he said.

The project was launched to mark the 20th anniversary of CERN making the World Wide Web available to the world for free.

British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, also called W3 or just the Web, at CERN in 1989 to help physicists to share information, but at the time it was just one of several such information retrieval systems using the Internet.

“It’s one of the biggest days in the history of the Web,” Noyes said of April 30, 1993. The first browser was actually very sophisticated, with images and features that don’t really exist anymore, like being able to edit web pages as well as read them.” “We would like to somehow enable people to try this,” he said.

The CERN team has restored the files using a 1992 copy of the first website, which can be viewed at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html