First-Ever Website Brought Back to Life
What’s the Latest Development?
It was just twenty years ago today that CERN published a statement making the World Wide Web a public facility. So to commemorate the moment, Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW team are bringing back the very first website ever published at its original URL. “The site has been reconstructed from an archive hosted on the W3C site, so what you’re seeing is a 1992 copy of the first website. Sadly this is, thus far, the earliest copy anyone can find, though the team at CERN is hoping to turn up an older copy.” To see the first webpage ever, point your browser to: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
What’s the Big Idea?
Developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in 1989, the research body has big plans for the original website, starting with bringing the rest of the pages back online. “Then we will look at the first web servers at CERN and see what assets from them we can preserve and share,” said CERN’s Dan Noyes. “We will also sift through documentation and try to restore machine names and IP addresses to their original state.” Currently, the site demonstrates some fundamental changes that occurred in early coding language, like the use of or the complete absence of a root tag.
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