The First Website — info.cern.ch

The first website was info.cern.ch, set up by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Its first page lived at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, and it was about the World Wide Web project itself. When it "went live" depends on what you count. According to CERN, the first server and browser were running inside CERN by the end of 1990; the site was announced to the outside world on 6 August 1991, when Berners-Lee posted to the alt.hypertext newsgroup.

The 1989 proposal and the NeXT machine that became the server are covered on the page for the World Wide Web proposal. This page is about the site that ran on it.

From late 1990 to August 1991

Putting the timeline the W3C keeps alongside CERN's account shows the site opening from the inside out.

That is why searches turn up two answers, December 1990 and August 1991. The first is when the site was working inside CERN; the second is when anyone on the internet could be told how to reach it.

The 6 August post

The post was a reply, not an announcement. Nari Kannan, writing from a DEC address, had asked whether anyone knew of work on hypertext links that could retrieve information from multiple heterogeneous sources. Berners-Lee answered: "The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere."

He described what existed: a prototype hypertext editor for the NeXT, and a browser for line-mode terminals that ran on almost anything. Both could read local files, NFS-mounted files and anonymous FTP, and could also use a simple protocol, HTTP, to talk to a server. A server on CERN's mainframe already made all of the computer centre's documentation available as hypertext.

The code, he wrote, was very much a prototype but could be fetched by anonymous FTP from info.cern.ch; it was copyright CERN, but free distribution and use was not normally a problem. Anyone reading the post in the NeXTStep editor could simply click on http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html to find out more. That is how the address of the first website was put in front of the outside world: inside a Usenet thread.

According to the W3C timeline the post went out twice on 6 August and again on 19 August, followed by comp.sys.next.announce on the 20th and comp.text.sgml and comp.mail.multi-media on the 22nd.

What was on the first site

The first site was not about the web's contents but about the web project. CERN's 2013 announcement says it described the basic features of the web, how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server.

The version readable at info.cern.ch today has these headings:

This is not exactly the August 1991 site. In April 2013 Dan Noyes of CERN wrote on the restoration project's blog that the files had been put back at the original address from a 1992 copy archived on the W3C site; it might be the earliest copy that could be found, and the team would keep looking for older ones. That is why it mentions things from 1992 such as the Viola browser. The site as it stood in 1990 or 1991 does not survive in its original form.

"Don't be disappointed"

For a while, one way to try it from outside was telnet; CERN started an anonymous telnet service in October 1991. The restoration project turned up a September 1993 article written for a conference of DFN, the German research network, which told readers that to find out about WWW they should type telnet info.cern.ch. That would give them the very basic line-mode interface. "Don't be disappointed," it went on: use it to find out how to install a better browser locally. The article gave info.cern.ch's IP address at the time as 128.141.201.74.

The 2013 restoration

On 30 April 2013, marking twenty years since the 1993 document that made web technology free for everyone to use, CERN announced a project to restore the first website and preserve the digital assets associated with the birth of the web. The announcement noted that the NeXT machine that had been the original web server was still at CERN, but that the first website was no longer online at its original address. The story of the 1993 decision itself is on the World Wide Web proposal page.

The project's objectives included restoring the files at the first URL to their earliest possible versions, restoring the machine names and IP addresses mentioned in the documentation, preserving the data and hardware of the NeXT machines, and recreating the experience of the line-mode browser and the NeXT browser/editor. CERN hosted line-mode browser hack days in September 2013, and today info.cern.ch lets you browse the first site through a line-mode browser simulator. In February 2019 another project at CERN rebuilt the WorldWideWeb browser inside a modern browser.

The first website can still be read at its original address — as a restored copy.

The web's later history is on the internet and web timeline, and the man who built the first server and browser is profiled under Tim Berners-Lee. For the protocol the site spoke, see HTTP in the glossary. Two years later the graphical Mosaic browser opened the web to ordinary users.