Public World Wide Web Turns Twenty Years Today

First Posted: Apr 30, 2013 02:51 PM EDT

The web technology was already invented in 1989 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, but it was on 30 April 1993 that CERN released the necessary software to the public domain for everyone to use with a historic statement that made World Wide Web ("W3", or simply "the web") technology officially available. By making the software required to run a web server available on a royalty-free basis, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.

The project, which inventor Berners-Lee named "World Wide Web", was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for information sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world.

"There is no sector of society that has not been transformed by the invention, in a physics laboratory, of the web," says Rolf Heuer, CERN Director-General. "From research to business and education, the web has been reshaping the way we communicate, work, innovate and live. The web is a powerful example of the way that basic research benefits humankind."

Other information retrieval systems that used the internet - such as WAIS and Gopher - were available at the time, but the web's simplicity along with the fact that the technology was royalty free led to its rapid adoption and development.

The first website at CERN - and in the world - was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server. Although the NeXT machine - the original web server - is still at CERN, sadly the world's first website is no longer online at its original address.

That could change soon since CERN started a project to restore the first website and to preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web, marking the 20th anniversary of this historic development. To learn more about the project and the first website, visit https://info.cern.ch

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