CERN has announced today that it is embarking on a new, landmark project to restore the first website in the world, with help from Mark Boulton Design.
Twenty years ago CERN published a statement that made the World Wide Web (‘W3′, or simply ‘the web’) technology available on a royalty free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.
The technology, invented in 1989 at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for information sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world.
Other information retrieval systems that used the Internet – such as WAIS and Gopher – were available at the time, but the web’s simplicity along with the fact that the technology was royalty free led to its rapid adoption and development.
“There is no sector of society that has not been transformed by the invention, in a physics laboratory, of the web”, says Rolf Heuer, CERN Director-General. “From research to business and education, the web has been reshaping the way we communicate, work, innovate and live. The web is a powerful example of the way that basic research benefits humankind.”
The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people’s documents and how to set up your own server. Although the NeXT machine – the original web server – is still at CERN, sadly the world’s first website is no longer online at its original address.
In celebration of the twenty-year anniversary, CERN has revealed it will be working to restore the first website and preserve the digital assets associated with the birth of the web.
Mark Boulton Design, who have worked with CERN extensively over the past two years on the redesign of its public website, will be collaborating with the web team at CERN on the project.
“It’s hard to imagine the way the world was before the web,” says Mark Boulton, Founder of Mark Boulton Design. “The very nature of the web means websites come and go – even the important ones. Digital preservation of valuable content is as important as other preservation work. We’re thrilled to be working on preserving some of the most important digital content for the enjoyment of future generations.”
To learn more about the project and the first website, visit http://info.cern.ch.
