Geneva - The world’s first web page will be dragged out of cyberspace and restored for today’s internet browsers as part of a project to celebrate 20 years of the web, organisers said on Tuesday.
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) said it had begun recreating the website that launched the world wide web, as well as the hardware that made the groundbreaking technology possible.
The world’s first website was about the technology itself, according to Cern, allowing early browsers to learn about the new system and create their own web pages.
The project will allow future generations to understand the origin of the web and its impact on modern life, Cern web manager Dan Noyes said.
“We’re going to put these things back in place, so that a web developer or someone who’s interested 100 years from now can read the first documentation that came out from the world wide web team,” he said.
The project was launched to mark the 20th anniversary of Cern making the world wide web available to the world for free.
British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web at Cern in 1989 to help physicists to share information, but at the time it was just one of several information retrieval systems using the internet.
“Cern’s gesture of giving away the web for free (on April 30, 1993) was what made it explode,” said Noyes.
The world’s very first web page was dedicated to the world wide web project itself.
The Cern team has restored the files using a 1992 copy of the first website, which can be viewed at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html –
Sapa-AFP