CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, is celebrating the 30th birthday of the first websites and web browsers:
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
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The internet would have looked very different without the atomic bomb.
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. In 2013, CERN launched a project to restore this first ever website: info.cern.ch.
CERN
Amazingly, the first website still works just fine in modern browsers. You can check it out here.
Another interesting detail here is that the first web browser was built on a NeXT computer –– that’s the company Steve Jobs started after he left Apple, whose software serves as the foundation for Mac OS X, iOS, and the operating systems on almost all other Apple devices today. NeXT never found commercial success, but the technology developed there ended up being profoundly influential on computing in the year 2020. Pretty wild to think about.
On 30 April 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. Later, CERN made a release available with an open licence, a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. These actions allowed the web to flourish.
CERN