Have you ever wondered what the original public website looked like?
There are billions of them today, but the first website was put online 30 years ago this month by a scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, who invited everyone to take part is his “World Wide Web” project.
Berners-Lee was a software developer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and he was frustrated with the clumsy way scientists at the organization shared research. So in late 1990 and early 1991 he began developing a system using hypertext that would allow computers of different kinds to easily share information over a connected network.
Finally, in August 1991, he issued an invitation for all scientists everywhere to participate: “The WWW project was started to allow high-energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation,” he wrote. “We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!”
Just as they do today, people followed hyperlinks by clicking them. Back then, though, users could edit the pages as well as view them. Since that eventually led to the World Wild Web, the need arose to make websites mostly a read-only medium.
Berners-Lee’s website was pretty boring, compared to today’s colorful, info-packed and design-focused sites. It looked like THIS.
Eventually, he developed a “fancy” browser-editor – the mostly gray precursor to today’s flashy Chrome and Firefox:
Photo: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
