World’s First Website is Still Up and Running

The inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee

On August 6th,1991  — 21 years ago –Tim Berners-Lee published the world’s first website from a lab in the Swiss Alps.

The world’s first website is still up and running more than two decades after its creation.

Berners-Lee first proposed his idea for a worldwide network of computers sharing information  in 1989, while he was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. According CERN’s history of the first website , it was written on a NeXT computer (pictured below), made by the company Steve Jobs founded after his ouster from Apple back in 1985.

World’s first website was created using this computer

Berners-Lee’s site went live in 1991, and was accessed by a decidedly small audience of fellow CERN researchers. It wasn’t until 1993, when web browser Mosaic was released, that the Web took off, as Wired explained last year.

The site, originally found at the clunky URL “http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html,” was updated frequently after launching; therefore, images of its earliest versions were never saved. Nevertheless, a later copy from 1992 is still preserved and welcoming visitors.

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