The folks at CERN, the organization responsible for devising the fundamental web standards, are celebrating World Wide Web's 20th birthday by bringing back the first ever website to its original URL.
Although the first website was launched in 1991, it was on April 30, 1993 when CERN made the WWW technology available on a royalty-free basis.
The website, obviously very scarce by today's standards, contains only text explaining some of the basics of the World Wide Web. It was originally available at this address — http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html — but for many years that URL has been redirecting to http://info.cern.ch.
Now, CERN has dug up a 1992 copy of the site — the earliest it could find — and put it back online at its original address.
CERN employees will keep trying to find an earlier copy; in the meantime, you can browse through it and see what the World Wide Web (all of it) was like in 1992.
by Stan Schroeder
