The First Ever Website

It was August 6, 1991, at a CERN facility in the Swiss alps, when 36 year-old physicist Tim Berners-Lee published the first ever website.  Info.cern.ch was the address of the world’s first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address washttp://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project.

The idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory. Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between texts on web pages using links.

Berners-Lee created a browser-editor with the goal of developing a tool to make the Web a creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext. What should they call this new browser: The Mine of Information? The Information Mesh? When they settled on a name in May 1990, it was the WorldWideWeb.

By March of 1991, testing was underway on a universal line mode browser, which would be able to run on any computer or terminal. It was designed to work simply by typing commands. There was no mouse, no graphics, just plain text, but it allowed anyone with an Internet connection access to the information on the Web.

Ofcourse the only people who were in possession of a web browser was the CERN, so the rest of the world at this point remained completely oblivious to the momentous event that had just taken place. Gradually the installation of web servers and web browsers spread, but it wasn’t really until 1993 when Mosaic Browsers were released that the technology really achieved serious momentum.

In 1994 Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (often referred to as W3C) at MIT in order to set an international standard where different website can run under same or similar protocols all over the world. We can all assume that had it not been for these protocols the web as we know it would not be the same under the guidance of W3C.

Although the Web’s conception began as a tool to aid physicists answer tough questions about the Universe, today its usage applies to various aspects of the global community and affects our daily lives. Today there are upwards of 80 million websites, with many more computers connected to the Internet, and hundreds of millions of users. If households nowadays want a computer, it is not to compute, but to go on the Web.

 

Bakona Madikane