First Website

It was the year 1990 something, well OK, it was 1991 and the first web site was made. Yes, people, the web was around before AOL…  So how did this site come about and it wasn’t my website. That didn’t come about until 1997.

History

Tim Berners-Lee was a computer scientist and worked at CERN, which is a large particle Physics Lab in Switzerland, back in the late 1980s. He realized something odd about all the projects around the world and how to keep track of them. With all the different computer systems out there how will they keep track of them all?  He proposed an information management system that used hypertext, the hypertext linked documents to other things on other computers.

NeXT computer had developed something called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) this is what a creates web pages, hence, the one you are viewing now and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) but how does one find the information. You have to have the Uniform Resource Locators (URL’s).

All said and done

So the first web site ever built is here http://info.cern.ch (see hypertext) He could have become the richest person in the known universe if he patents the web technology. But he rejected the desire to do that and wanted it to be an open market. He said the following: “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

Now the internet is what it is.  

Citation Information

Article Title

The World’s First Web Site

Author

Elizabeth Nix

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/news/the-worlds-first-web-site

Access Date

June 28, 2019

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 30, 2018