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See the world’s first website, back online at its original URL in all its early, picture-free splendour

More from Daniel Kaszor | @dkaszor

A screen grab of the world's first website.

CERN puts the world's first website back online

Twenty years ago CERN released the code for the world-wide-web to the public free of charge, inventing what we now think of as the modern Internet. (Yes, they were also the same guys who have that giant particle collider that’s helping solve the mysteries of the universe.)

What's the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet?

Although people get the web and the Internet mixed up, they aren’t actually the same thing.

The Internet is a general world-wide network that was born out of the U.S. government’s ARPANET, created in the late 1960s, and codified into the modern Internet in 1982. Everything we do over an inter-connected network that travels over TCP/IP protocol (ie., outside your local network) uses the Internet. This can mean the web, but also entails email, FTP, mobile apps and other more arcane protocols.

The web, on the other hand, is a way for you to interface with information sent over the Internet. Basically, a web page is anything fed to you via a URL ( and written in some version of “hyper text markup language” or HTML.

To celebrate the anniversary,CERN scientists have put the world’s very first web page back online at its original URL.

Appropriately, the website’s subject is the World Wide Web itself: a blueprint on how to build another web-page circa the early 1990s. The site is picture-free, as were most early web pages (they had to be compatible with text-only Internet terminals).

Despite this being the 20th anniversary of CERN releasing the keys the World Wide Web to the public for free, the protocol (or W3 as it was known back then) was actually first implemented in 1989, which is when this webpage  first launched. W3 was (and still is) centred around the idea of “hypertext,” where words can have embedded actions attached to them that “link” to other W3 pages or perform other actions. To do this, web pages are built around a “hyper text markup language” or HTML.

There were many rival protocols that did similar things to the web that were more established in the early 1990s

That 1989 version of the site is sadly lost to history now, with no known archive. CERN’s version is from 1992, the first preserved in their records.

So where does 1993 come in? Twenty years ago, CERN released the code for “W3” to the world for free. This revolutionary, royalty-free gesture — and the fact that websites were so easy to code and to use — made the web the go-to choice for Internet development and then the standard for information transmission.

The web caught on partially due to its “free”-ness. At the same time as the web’s creation, Apple offered a program called HyperCard for Mac OS 6 and OS 7 computers. HyperCard “stacks” were in many ways far more versatile than early W3 pages and could be easily put together using a graphical editor. However, since you needed to buy the HyperCard reader to both create and read stacks, they often weren’t networked together.

However, it wasn’t just the fact that W3 was royalty free which made it a success. There were many rival protocols that did similar things to the web that were more established in the early 1990s, such as Gopher. However, with the advent of faster connections to the net, the more versatile W3 pages, which could easily show inline images and text styles, surpassed the more rigid and text-based older systems.

And that first website isn’t the only thing CERN is preserving, the group has a whole project dedicated to the early web, which can be found here.

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