To Celebrate Web Freedom, CERN Has Brought the First Website Back Online

On April 30, 1993, the internet-loving folks at CERN published a document that turned the World Wide Web over to the public domain, fostering two decades of an open web that's boomed until it's more or less taken over the planet. Now, in a bid to honor that ideal of an open web as it increasingly becomes covered in proprietary layers, CERN has dug up the first website ever and brought it back online.

The version available is dated from 1992, which is apparently the oldest instance of the site that CERN researchers could find—although they're still looking. As you'll remember, the web is the not the internet—the World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, and was (and still is) one of many ways you can access the Internet. But CERN's 1993 decision to make its World Wide Web royalty-free more or less rendered the competition obsolete, and led to the web as we know it dominating the internet.

According to CERN, the first website was hosted on Berner-Lee's NeXT computer. As you can see now that the site's live again, it's mostly dedicated to explaining what the web is and does, how to set up your own server, and other mostly technical-minded stuff. Reading the site's executive summary is a treat, however, as it highlights just how novel the concept of a web-type platform was.

It's since taken off, as you might have guess. As CERN's main site states, "by late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers, and the WWW accounted for 1% of internet traffic, which seemed a lot in those days (the rest was remote access, e-mail and file transfer). Twenty years on, there are an estimated 630 million websites online."

And to think it all started with cross-dressing. (I kid.) The fact of the matter is that the explosive growth of the web into the dominant internet platform is all thanks to CERN's decision to set it free. If that hadn't happened, and developing and accessing sites on the internet meant navigating untold various platforms, it's possible the internet's growth over the last two decades wouldn't have been quite so explosive. The web has become an essential part of our lives and economy because it's remained free, in more than just a monetary sense. It's important that it remains so.

@derektmead