The world’s first website is now a quarter century old

It’s weird how the Web still feels like a new thing in a lot of ways, but it’s actually older than many of the people who use it. In fact, the world’s first website was launched exactly twenty-five years ago on Sunday, although it wasn’t until several months later that the website was actually publicly-accessible. Known as the Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, it was meant to be a provide a bare-bones explanation of what the Web was and how to use it, and a 1992 version of the website is still accessible. 

Twenty-five years ago, the world’s very first website debuted. Called Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, the site went online at CERN on December 20, 1990. As Engadget noted, this wasn’t the date the website went public (that happened several months later on August 6, 1991), but the moment still marked an important milestone in information network history. “It’s safe to say that this plain page laid the groundwork for much of the Internet as you know it — even now, you probably know one or two people who still think the Web is the Internet,” the news outlet wrote. A 1992 version of the World Wide Web (screenshot above) is still online. As CERN explained, it was a bare-bones explainer of the “basic features of the web; how to access other people’s documents and how to set up your own server.” The Web was invented in 1989 by Berners-Lee, a British scientist. WWW is closely-linked to the Internet, though it’s not at all the same thing. As BBC explained: “The Internet is a huge network of computers all connected together. The World Wide Web is a collection of webpages found on this network of computers. Your web browser uses the Internet to access the Web.” Happy 25th birthday, World Wide Web!