On 6th August, 25 years ago the world’s first website went live to the public. The site, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was a basic text page with hyperlinked words that connected to other pages.
Berners-Lee used the public launch to outline his plan for the service, which would come to dominate life in the twenty-first century. He wanted the World Wide Web to be a place where people could share information across the world through documents and links navigated with a simple search function.
The first step of making that a reality occurred on August 6, 1991, and was hailed with little fanfare when Berners Lee launched the first web page from his NeXT computer at CERN’s headquarters in Geneva.
Housed at http://info.cern.ch, the founding website contained basic instructions for how the web worked, including how to access documents and set up your own server. CERN reinstated the page at its original address in 2013.
One of the first practical uses of Berners-Lee’s creation was an internal phone book for CERN employees, which Bernd Pollermann uploaded soon after it went live. The following year the first picture was uploaded to the web: a kitsch image of CERN’s all-female parody pop band Les Horribles Cernettes.###
