World’s First Ever Web Page Went Online 25 Years Ago This Week

The World’s first ever website turned 25 years old this week.

Just in case you’re interested as well, I feel I should point out that this makes it the oldest web page in history.  In internet terms of time that makes it almost as old as the dinosaurs, but quite as far back as the Big Bang.

The Internet is older than you think…

The internet, a worldwide system of interconnected computer networks had already been around for several years, before the web actually came into existence.

The Big Bang of the internet, as it were, happened back in the 1970’s. It had been possible to send data from remote computer to computer for almost 15 years, but making it accessible by people at large had always been quite elusive, leaving it largely in the preserve of military and governments across the world.

The world’s first web page. It’s as black and white as it looks.

Enter Europe, Cern, and a Computer programmer.

However, in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN for short, changed all that, when he unveiled the world’s first website, 25 years ago this week. The official date for the world’s first web page going live was December 20^th, 1991.

Berners-Lee’s original intention had been to try and find a way for scientists to share information around the Earth. Berners-Lee himself christened his solution the World Wide Web. Contrary to popular belief, the internet and the World Wide Web are actually 2 different things entirely.

The difference between the World Wide Web of 1990, and today couldn’t be any more different. With over a billion registered web domains, and an estimated 4 billion webpages, the Web, has come a long way.

The original website was by today’s terms, basic to say the least, essentially a working model that showed others what could be done by utilising the power of the internet.

This is for everyone.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Berners-Lee’s creation was the fact that the web project’s designs were published openly, alongside all the code required to setup and run servers and rudimentary browsers. In short, it could be copied by anyone, for free, and the Web was born.

The world’s original web page is also still going. You can view the world’s first and oldest web page, here, courtesy of CERN.