World's First Website Preserved By Cern More Than 20 Years Later

What Did The World's First Website Look Like?

Inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee might have appeared in the Olympic Opening Ceremony, but he still doesn't have the recognition factor you might expect.

That said, there is one corner of the Internet where he is forever king.

The corner he invented.

The first website ever published, created by Berners-Lee more than 20 years ago, is still online and welcoming visitors after being preserved by Cern.

The project, developed at the Cern laboratory (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) was a landmark achievement in a string of developments which led to the modern internet.

Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever web site and web server (and still is).

Above: the no-frills website

And as was pointed out on Reddit recently, Cern have preserved (or remade) the page for all to see.

It ran on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer and could be found at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. It's no-frills look was testament to the web's early stage of development - indeed it was not yet possible to display images.

On the page, Berners-Lee calls for help building his project. It says:

"If you know something of what's going on in a particular field, organization or country, would you like to keep up-to-date an overview of online data?"

"There are many ways of doing this. The web needs both raw data -- fresh hypertext or old plain text files, or smart servers giving views of existing databases."

It also lists the people involved in the project, including Berners-Lee himself.

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