The World Wide Web or www has turned twenty this month.
The first website built on CERN was put online on 6 August 1991, but the project had begun earlier.
CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, says on its website that it was in the end of 1990, that "a revolution took place that changed the way we live today."
In March 1989, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee had written a proposal titled Information Management: A proposal that showed how information could be transferred over the Internet. The following year systems engineer Robert Cailliau and joined the project.
Scientist at CERN, and boss of Tim Berners-Lee, Mike Sendall found the proposal "Vague, but exciting", allowing Berners-Lee to continue.
Tim Berners-Lee and his team settled on ‘WorldWideWeb’ as its name in May 1990.
Info.cern.ch was the address of the world’s first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN.
The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project.
The first line of the landing page of the website is: "The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents."
The page has information for visitors to learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and an explanation on how to search the Web for information.
Berners-Lee is now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and one of the first activists to advocate for ‘net neutrality’.
He says: "Threats to the Internet, such as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on Internet traffic, compromise basic human network rights."
