The World’s First Website Makes a Comeback
CERN — the European physics laboratory perhaps best known for a 17-mile-long particle collider — has another claim to fame: it’s the birthplace of the World Wide Web. As we’ve written before, the first web server went online in 1989, but this week marked the 20th anniversary of what is perhaps an even more remarkable event.
On April 30th, with the stroke of a pen, CERN’s directors released the World Wide Web software to the public domain. No complex licensing. No building a web server from scratch — you could use CERN’s code.
CERN is celebrating this anniversary by bringing the first web server, at info.cern.ch, back online in its original form. That’s exactly what we like to see at the Highland Historic Computer Museum — we want you to experience history, not just view dusty screenshots of how it used to look.
“The system must achieve a critical usefulness early on,” Tim Berners-Lee wrote in his original proposal. “Absolutely right!” his colleague Robert Cailliau wrote in the margin of his copy.
CERN’s historic decision to put the software in the public domain, without complex licensing restrictions, may have helped the web achieve that critical usefulness that, by 1992, lead Tim to abandon his list of web servers on the original site.
“Note: this page is here for historical interest only; the content hasn’t been updated since late 1992,” he wrote.
It’s historically fascinating.