It was August 6, 1991, at a CERN facility in the Swiss Alps, when 36-year-old physicist Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website. It was, not surprisingly, a pretty basic one… Source: 20 Years Ago Today: The First Website Is Published – Wired.com.
Wow, 20 years of the WorldWideWeb (W3)!
Back in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee along with Robert Cailliau and some folks at CERN invented the World Wide Web. By 1991 they were sharing hypertext documents. By 1992 Stanford had a “web server.” In 1993 NCSA released Mosaic, a basic, but more sophisticated, browser for personal computers.
The original page changed often with updates of the project and eventually it was removed, but a copy of it was saved to the W3C website – http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html circa 1992 version – as a historical document.
The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Source: Welcome to info.cern.ch.
I’ve spent almost 15 years looking at WWW and HTML. By 1995 it was easy for anyone to download web server software and have it running a website. I would say things were a lot simpler back then, but in fact “times” are the same. Times and hypertext documents were much less sophisticated back in 1995. The technology grew to match the demand.
Even today I think it’s important to recognize the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Web is just one services using the Internet to transmit data. The Internet was around well before the Web.
The Web is not identical to the Internet; it is only one of the many Internet-based communication services. The relation between them may be understood by using the analogy with the global road system. On the Internet, as in the road system, three elements are essential: the physical connections (roads and cables), the common behaviour (circulation rules and Internet protocol) and the services (mail delivery and the WWW). Source: CERN – How the web works.
The Internet was “invented” or started in 1958 with the ARPA project. In 1983, it went global with the TCP/IP standard.