CERN Brings World’s First Website Back Online
The world’s first ever web page has been recreated by a team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) as part of efforts to preserve the hardware and software which gave birth to the now ubiquitous network.
When you mention CERN these days, most people will think “large hadron collider but the clever folks over at CERN were also responsible for devising the fundamental web standards. As part of celebrating the World Wide Web’s 20th birthday they’re bringing back the first ever website to its original URL.
The website, naturally, looks pretty bare by today’s standards and contains only text explaining some of the basics of the World Wide Web.
It was originally available at this address — http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html— but for many years that URL has been redirecting to http://info.cern.ch.
But now it is again displaying the information that it did when it first went live.
“For many years, this URL has been dormant, inactive. It simply redirected to the web host root of http://info.cern.ch,” says Dan Noyes, web manager in the CERN communications group on the CERN webpages.
“We just put the files back online, using the archive that is hosted on the W3C site. This is a 1992 copy of the first website. This may be the earliest copy that we can find, but we’re going to keep looking for earlier ones.”
The hope is that the restoration of the first web page and web site will serve as a reminder and inspiration of the web’s fundamental values.
[CERN, The Verge]
