For a brief moment let’s go back into the world before Google, Facebook and Twitter and you won’t regret it. It is about a phenomenon lost to the world: The first website.
The researchers at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the organization responsible for devising the fundamental web standards, today restored the first website to its original URL.
Although the first website was launched in 1991, it was on April 30, 1993 when CERN made the WWW technology available on a royalty-free basis.
The site’s reappearance is part of a project to preserve the history of the Web, and to celebrate 20 years of a “free, open Web.” "It's one of the biggest days in the history of the web," said CERN web manager Dan Noyes.
The world's first website was about the technology itself, according to CERN, allowing early browsers to learn about the new system and create their own web pages.
Created by British computer scientist and Web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the web page outlined the basics of what would become the web we know today.
During 1989, the London-born physicist and computer scientist was working at (CERN) in Geneva when he first wrote and developed the web software to act as a way for CERN physicists and engineers to manage and share information as well as to meet the increasing demand for information-sharing between scientists in universities and research institutes around the world.
He developed the software – known as hypertext markup language (HTML), hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and universal resource locators (URLs) – on a £5,000 computer called “the cube” because of its black case.
The Website itself isn’t much to look at — just a rundown of the product that includes a look at its development history, instructions of how to create your own pages and technical information about the World Wide Web — but it laid the groundwork for an estimated 630 million Web sites to come in the next 20 years, CERN said in a blog post.
The original address of the website was —http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html — but for many years that URL has been redirecting to http://info.cern.ch.
Now, CERN has found a 1992 copy of the site — the earliest it could find — and put it back online at its original address.
Mr James Gillies, Head of Communications at Cern believes that the document is "the single most valuable document in the history of the world wide web".
Interest in the first Web site was so high Tuesday that the site went offline briefly.
The group responsible for its restoration posted a Twitter message saying“We’re working on it, adding “Terrific to see so much interest!”
The page’s resurrection is part of a larger project to recreate the experience of using early Web browsers, preserving data on the first Web servers used by Berners-Lee and providing an archive of information on the earliest days of the Web.
CERN employees will keep trying to find an earlier copy; in the meantime, you can browse through it and see what the World Wide Web (all of it) was like in 1992.
The group is also trying to preserve the first hardware used to host early Web files, including a 1990s era, $6,500 computer built by NeXT — the company founded by Steve Jobs after he was ousted from Apple in 1985. The computer is still intact but does not work, the BBC reported.
Noble Foundation
The core principle underlying the project was that the content should be universally accessible.
It was one of the most generous gestures in computing history as the laboratory decided not to charge royalties on the software required to run the web, and in the process generated an explosive revolution in human communications.
There was a serious discussion at Cern in 1993 about whether the organisation should own the web or whether it should focus on its core mission of basic research in physics.
Sir Tim and his colleagues on the project argued that Cern should not claim ownership of the web.
Management agreed and signed a legal document that made the web publicly available without anyone being able to claim ownership of it and ensuring it was a free and open standard for everyone to use.
Calling it the World Wide Web hints at the fact that Berners-Lee and his team knew they had something special, something big.
The early WWW team, led by Tim at CERN, had such vision and belief that the early users would be able to publish their own content in spite of few people having access to browsers - or to web servers.
An inspiration for future inventors
The European Laboratory for Nuclear Physics in Geneva said that it hoped the project would inspire children to appreciate its momentous decision to give away the technology for free 20 years ago and its impact on modern life.
"We're going to put these things back in place, so that a web developer or someone who's interested 100 years from now can read the first documentation that came out from the world wide web team," said Noyes.
Besides,the principles of universality and universal access behind the original systems was an effort to make the world a fairer and more equal place.
The first browser, for example, allowed users to edit and write directly into the content, a feature not available on present-day browsers.
Hope that the restoration of the first web page and web site will serve as a reminder and inspiration of the web's fundamental values.