CERN Marks 20 Years Of Making Available WorldWideWeb Technology

Screenshot of the original NeXT web browser in 1993. (Photo Credit: CERN)

Twenty years ago the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) put its WorldWideWeb technology in the public domain.

The technology was invented in 1989 at Geneva-based CERN by Tim Berners-Lee, according to CERN, and was originally meant for information-sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world.

“On 30 April 1993, CERN made the source code of WorldWideWeb available on a royalty-free basis,” the CERN said, and “the software was free for anyone to use, and remains so today.” By late 1993, the WorldWideWeb (also referred to as W3 or “the web”) accounted for 1 percent of internet traffic, about 500 websites, it said. There are now an estimated 630 million websites online.

To celebrate this anniversary, CERN is starting a project to restore the first website and “to preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web.” The project is a travel back in time and aims restoring the first URL, and looking at the first web servers at CERN to “see what assets from them we can preserve and share.”

The ultimate goal of the project, according to CERN, is to “make http://info.cern.ch – the first web address – a destination that reflects the story of the beginnings of the web for the benefit of future generations.”