The first website celebrates 34 years: how a modest project at CERN laid the foundations of the global internet

By: Vlad Cherevko | 20.12.2024, 18:16
Tim Berners-Lee: Father of the World Wide Web The creator of the first internet site, Tim Berners-Lee.. Source: CNET

Today, 20 December, marks the 34th anniversary of the launch of the first website created by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee on 20 December 1990.

Here's What We Know

The site was initially only available to employees of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), but a year later became available to all Internet users who had one. This text-based site served as a guide to using the Internet and contained links to information about the project, instructions on how to access documents, and how to set up your own server.

Since few people knew what a "server" was at the time, Berners-Lee, who worked at CERN, left a written warning on the NeXT computer hosting the project: "This machine is a server. DO NOT SWITCH IT OFF!!!". At the time, the project was modest in scale and was intended purely for document exchange and collaboration between scientists. However, the potential of the Internet was evident even at this early stage. Today, that first site is still available and serves as a reminder of how far technology has come since then.

Updated: The sticker was actually made by Tim's colleague, Dominique Bertola. As he tells it, one morning, he witnessed Tim Berners-Lee's outrage when someone accidentally unplugged the power cable of the world's first web server. DB found a new cable, helped restart the server, and wrote a sticker asking him not to turn off the machine. 

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