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G ENEV A , 3 0 A P RI L 2 0 1 3
Twenty years of a
free, open web
On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement
that made World Wide Web technology
available on a royalty free basis, allowing the
web to flourish
On 30 April 1993 CERN published a
statement that made World Wide Web
("W3", or simply "the web") technology
available on a royalty-free basis. By
making the software required to run a
web server freely available, along with
a basic browser and a library of code,
the web was allowed to flourish.
British physicist Tim Berners-Lee
invented the web at CERN in 1989. The
project, which Berners-Lee named "World
Wide Web", was originally conceived and
developed to meet the demand for
information sharing between physicists
in universities and institutes around the
world.
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Screenshot of the original NeXT web browser in 1993
Other information retrieval systems that
used the internet - such as WAIS and
Gopher - were available at the time, but
the web's simplicity along with the fact
that the technology was royalty free led to
its rapid adoption and development.
There is no sector of society that has not
been transformed by the invention, in a
physics laboratory, of the web, says Rolf
Heuer, CERN Director-General. From
research to business and education, the web
has been reshaping the way we
communicate, work, innovate and live. The
web is a powerful example of the way that
basic research benefits humankind.
The first website at CERN - and in the
world - was dedicated to the World Wide
Web project itself and was hosted on
Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. The
website described the basic features of the
web; how to access other people's
documents and how to set up your own
server. Although the NeXT machine - the
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original web server - is still at CERN,
sadly the world's first website is no
longer online at its original address.
To mark the anniversary of the
publication of the document that made
web technology free for everyone to use,
CERN is starting a project to restore the
first website and to preserve the digital
assets that are associated with the birth of
the web. To learn more about the project
and the first website, visit http://first-
website.web.cern.ch
Read about the restoration project
Browse the first website
Vinton Cerf on the architecture, connectivity
and openness of the web
Robert Cailliau on the birth of the web and
"How to spread this thing"
Info.cern.ch - the worlds first website
British physicist Tim Berners-Lee
invented the World Wide Web at CERN in
1989. To document the project he created
the worlds first website, info.cern.ch
The birth of the web
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Berners-Lee running WorldWideWeb software at CERN in
1994
In March 1989, British physicist Tim
Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to develop
a distributed information system for
CERN physicists and engineers. It
described a way of managing information
about the accelerators and experiments at
the laboratory using a system of
documents linked together and accessible
via the internet. His supervisor, Mike
Sendall, wrote vague, but exciting on
the cover of the proposal, and, with those
words, gave the green light to an
information revolution.
Berners-Lee saw the working structure of
CERN as a "web" whose interconnections
evolve with time. Large, collaborative
projects at CERN, such as the Large
Electron-Positron collider (LEP),
predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC) - created vast amounts of
information that needed to be accessible
to large numbers of people. What was
needed, wrote Berners-Lee, was a pool
of information which could grow and
evolve with the organisation and the
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projects it describes.
Read the proposal in full
The cover page of "Information Management: A proposal" by
Tim Berners-Lee in March 1989. His supervisor, Mike Sendall,
has written "vague, but exciting" at the top of the page. See
full size version
The internet and hypertext
In 1989 the internet was already a mature
set of protocols that enabled data to be
transferred between and within different
networks in small "packets". The internet
was used as a foundation for uses such as
email and file transfer systems such as
the then-popular Gopher.
A community of enthusiasts was sharing
ideas on how to create "hypertext"
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systems that featured links between
documents. HyperCard for the Apple
Macintosh was a popular early example of
a working hypertext system that featured
links between "cards".
With WorldWideWeb, Berners-Lee used
the internet to create a networked
hypertext system that allowed CERN
physicists to read and publish documents,
and to create links between and within
them.
The WWW team
Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau
joined the World Wide Web (WWW)
project and soon became its number one
advocate, fighting for resources for the
project. A small team of students joined
the project over the next couple of years,
working on short-term contracts to
contribute to code and protocols.
The first website
The worlds first website was about the
WWW project itself.
Visitors could learn more about the web,
access technical details for creating their
own web page, and even find an
explanation on how to search for
information. There are no screenshots of
this original page and, in any case,
changes were made daily to the
information available on the page as the
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WWW project developed.
See a 1993 copy of this first website at its
original address,
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
What NeXT?
The first web server: Tim Berners-Lee used this NeXT
computer in 1990 to develop and run the first WWW server,
multimedia browser and web editor
Berners-Lee developed WorldWideWeb
software on a NeXT computer, a model
developed, manufactured, and sold from
1988 until 1990 by the NeXT Inc.
company founded by Apple co-founder
Steve Jobs. The NeXT had a 305
millimetre die-cast magnesium, cube-
shaped, black case, which led to the
machine being informally referred to as
"The Cube". It cost US$6500.
Though the NeXT did not prove a
commercial success, the machines were
way ahead of their time, offering
interfaces and tools that are familiar to
computer users 20 years later. Berners-
Lee used the advanced operating system
NeXTSTEP to rapidly develop a working
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prototype server and browser. The
original browser was called
"WorldWideWeb" but later renamed
Nexus to avoid confusion with the
information space.
The universal line-mode browser
A website is like a telephone; if there is
just one it is not much use. Berners-Lee's
team needed to send out server and
browser software so that people could set
up their own websites. The NeXT systems
were far advanced over the computers
people generally had at their disposal, so
less sophisticated software was needed
for distribution.
By spring of 1991, testing was underway
on a universal line-mode browser that
allowed people to access the web,
regardless of the kind of computer system
used. The browser was designed to work
simply by typing commands. There was
no mouse and no graphics, but it allowed
anyone with an internet connection to
access the web.
It was a core principal of the web that
content should be universally accessible:
someone using a crude browser could
access the same content as users of
advanced browsers such as Nexus,
complete with mouse and graphical
capabilities.
Berners-Lee also set up a system so that
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people who didnt have a browser could
surf the web: simply email the CERN
server with a web address (URL) and you
would receive an email back with the
content from the URL in the body of the
email.
The web explodes
On 30 April 1993, CERN made the source
code of WorldWideWeb available on a
royalty-free basis; the software was free
for anyone to use, and remains so today.
Web usage exploded as people started
setting up their own servers and websites.
By late 1993 there were over 500 known
web servers, and the WWW accounted for
1% of internet traffic, which seemed a lot
in those days (the rest was remote access,
e-mail and file transfer). Twenty years
on, there are an estimated 630 million
websites online.
For press enquiries, please contact the CERN press office at
press@cern.ch
Copyright CERN 2013