Late December 1990 was a pivotal time, although none of us realized it for a few years. Tim Berners-Lee, A British computer scientist working in Switzerland, was working on what became the World Wide Web. Over the course of a few months, he invented HTML, the web browser, and the web server, to make it easier to share information. Sometime in late December, the first web server reached a usable state. By some accounts it was December 20, 1990. By at least one account I found, it was December 25.
The first web server’s address
The early work on the World Wide Web took place on NeXT workstations. Berners-Lee’s workstation lived at info.cern.ch.CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. It might be the most momentous shadow IT project in history.
No screenshots exist of the web page in its earliest form, unfortunately, although I did find an approximation of how the page appeared in 1992. Not surprisingly, the first web page was technical information about the web, including how HTML, web servers, and web browsers worked.
The earliest copy of the page I could find on archive.org, from 2000, stated the web page and the computer that hosted it no longer exist. In August 2006, CERN memorialized the first web page and first web server with a page about it.
Berners-Lee’s original goal was making information more accessible. Valuable data resided in various formats on computers throughout the organization. Berners-Lee’s goal was to unlock the data so it could link together and be readable from any machine.
What happened next
It took a few years for the World Wide Web to go worldwide. By January 1993, NSCA Mosaic, a cross-platform web browser, was available, which gave rise to Netscape. The web caught on quickly on college campuses with browsers that ran on all of the major platforms of the time. Efforts to commercialize the web led to the dotcom boom, and, eventually, to the online world we know today.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.