A screen shot of the world’s first web page
Researchers at the CERN research institute in Europe have launched a project to reproduce the world’s first web page, just 20 years after it was produced.
Despite Al Gore’s claims that he ‘created the internet’ it was in fact Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, who was behind the initiative.
A memo issued by Sir Tim to his colleagues, in April 1993, marked the start of the now ubiquitous world wide web. He referred to it as W3.
He said the aim of the world wide web was ‘to give universal access to a large universe of documents.’
In its early days the web was accessible by only a handful of CERN scientists.
CERN said it wanted to recreate the first web page to demonstrate just how far the internet had come in just 20 years – and how relatively sophisticated the first web page was, despite its simple appearance.
“You might have thought that the first browser would be very primitive but it was not. It had graphical capabilities. You could edit into it straightaway. It was an amazing thing. It was a very sophisticated thing,” said James Gillies, CERN’s head of communications.
CERN is better known for running the Large Hadron Collider, which aims to reproduce the so-called God Particle.
