A brief time-travel to the beginnings of the web – Conscious Communication Design Blog

While working at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. That was in 1989. The intention of it was originally the automated sharing of information between scientists.

In 2013, CERN launched a project to restore the first ever website, which can now be accessed at http://info.cern.ch/ and looks like this:

The first ever website can be accessed through: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Let’s not be fooled however, this is looking at it from a modern browser. Tim Berners-Lee’s first browser, which was called WorldWideWeb² (which was later renamed into Nexus as to not cause confusion between the software and the technology), was already a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get HTML editor, but in order for the browser to be accessible on other machines than just on NeXT Computers, the first line-mode browser was released in 1993.

Thankfully, CERN has also created a line-mode simulator which let’s us view the original website, but also any other, on a line-mode browser: https://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html