Article updated on January 6, 2025 by Byothe
In a world where the World Wide Web (WWW) is a fundamental part of our daily lives, it can be difficult to imagine What the first website in history looked like and the impact it had on the worldThe first web page and the WWW were created by the same person: the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, then a researcher at the prestigious European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva.
December 20, 1990 marked the beginning of a tool that still today allows information to be shared on a global scale thanks to a simple architecture based on documents and links between them (the famous "hypertext").
Despite the millions of web pages created and disappeared on the Internet (partly saved by projects like Internet Archive) since that date, This original web page has never stopped being online. So the first website in history is still accessible at the address info.cern.ch.
In its early days, this web page was hosted on Berners-Lee's own NeXT computer, which bore a note reading: " This machine is a server. DO NOT TURN OFF.«
A simple web page but one that lays the foundations
This first website in history was (and still is) extremely simple compared to modern web pages: it had no colors, no images, no videos, no animations. And no advertising either! All that came later.
It was simply a page with a white background (although it depends on the browser, some early software displayed a gray background by default) with text and links.
And yet, Its content was essential to understanding the revolution that was about to take place. : it showed basic instructions on how the web works, including information on how to access documents and set up your own server.
The first web page of the World Wide Web was self-referential, that is, it dealt with the technical aspects of the WWW itself.
Indeed, just below the heading "World Wide Web," the page explained the purpose of the Internet as follows:
"The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a large-scale hypermedia information retrieval initiative that aims to provide universal access to a vast universe of documents."
This ambitious statement laid the foundation for what would become the World Wide Web.. However, it was not until 1993 that CERN announced that the web would be a publicly available and free technology for all, a decision that took this tool out of its exclusively scientific use and marked the beginning of the digital age as we know it.
On the other hand, this page cannot be considered as "the origin of the Internet", as one can sometimes read: the Internet had existed for decades, even if it was used for other things (Bulletin Board System, FTP...).
A page that could be included in the World Heritage as the first website in history?
On the occasion of International Internet Day 2022, the Telefónica Foundation had launched a global initiative to promote the recognition of the first web page as a 'World Heritage' by UNESCO.
The initiative was called #ElSitio1155, in reference to the fact that UNESCO had so far declared 1 physical sites around the world as World Heritage Sites, but none in the virtual world:
"Without the existence of the 'info.cern.ch' page, the environment we live in would be completely different and unimaginable, and the channels through which we communicate and inform ourselves would probably not exist. It is a fundamental piece of our history and culture and deserves recognition for all that it has offered to society."
In short, the first web page in history, still active to this day, represents much more than a mere relic of the digital past. It symbolizes the beginning of a revolutionary era in the sharing and access to information. Its continued existence and the proposal to recognize it as a UNESCO World Heritage Site perfectly illustrate the profound and lasting impact of the web on our society. This page, in its simplicity, recalls the humility of the early days of the web and underlines the importance of preserving our digital heritage for future generations.
