Maybe it’s because we’ve experienced it and we remember those first pages lacking design that used to load slowly, but it’s nice to remember the World Wide Web’s birthday officially born on the 30th April 1993.
Internet already existed as a means of exchange for files and emails mainly through Gopher, but for some time its exclusive users, mainly scientists, had been working on a new hypertext system that would allow them to create links between documents. Such a primitive system was Apple’s Hypercard.
The World Wide Web really represented a true revolution. Its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee created it on March 1989 as a tool for allowing CERN’s researchers to read, publish and link documents on the Internet network. The supervisor’s comment had been “vague but exciting”.
The Web spread quite rapidly and on the 30th April 1993 the CERN decided to make the World Wide Web code freely available without requesting any payment for royalties. At that moment, around 500 servers were connected to the network which already represented a considerable number, nowadays an estimate suggests over 630 millions of sites.
In order to celebrate the event, Geneva’s CERN has published on its site the page of the first 1993 site created by Berners-Lee. A simple page where he explained Web’s functioning, a now-historical document that can be accessed at its original address http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.