On April 30, 1993, CERN made the World Wide Web technology available on a royalty-free basis. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of this Internet milestone, the organization has restored the very first website.
The move will "preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the Web," CERN said on its website. Ultimately, the organization wants that Web address - info.cern.ch - to be "a destination that reflects the story of the beginnings of the web for the benefit of future generations."
CERN, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is an international organization that operates the world's largest particle physics laboratory.
The first URL was "http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html." For years, however, it has redirected to the CERN website's Web host root. But using the archive hosted on the W3C site, CERN put the files back online and recreated a 1992 version of the very first website.
"This may be the earliest copy that we can find, but we're going to keep looking for earlier ones," CERN said.
Not surprisingly, the site (below) is rather sparse, with links to information about the WWW project and how people can get involved.
The World Wide Web dates back to 1989, thanks to the work of Tim Berners-Lee (pictured), who created the first website at info.cern.ch. At the time, "the Internet was already a mature set of protocols," CERN said. But the World Wide Web created "a networked hypertext system that allowed CERN physicists to read and publish documents, and to create links between and within them."
By 1993, CERN made the World Wide Web's source code available on a royalty-free basis, leading to the growth of the Internet as we know it. As CERN pointed out, the WWW was easier to use than other systems that were available at the time, like WAIS and Gopher. At the end of 1993, there were 500 Web servers and the WWW made up 1 percent of Web traffic; today there are approximately 630 million websites.
In addition to restoring the first URL, CERN wants to comb through the CERN Web servers to "see what assets from them we can preserve and share."
"We will also sift through documentation and try to restore machine names and IP addresses to their original state," the organization said.
CERN also posted Berners-Lee's original proposal for the WWW, which he wrote in March 1989 and first distributed in May 1990. It was intended to persuade CERN that the development of the WWW was a worthwhile endeavor.
