On August 6th, 1991, the first public website on the internet went live. There wasn’t much pomp and ceremony to it, other than an announcement on a Usenet group. In fact, it didn’t garner much attention until the 23rd of August when new users started visiting the site. The rest is history and the site can still be viewed here.
Compared to the rich content we see nowadays, the first website ever was a sight for sore eyes. It featured a description of the World Wide Web, some technical details and more. But it was a start. And it was the brainchild of one person. Berners-Lee first dreamed up the idea of the web way back in 1989 by using the global internet, which was still in its diapers, to host pages that anyone could access. By 1990, he had written up the code for HTML that websites are based on as well as the HTTP standard. While his website actually went live in 1990, he didn’t share it publicly to those outside of CERN till August 6th.
Of course, the internet that we know today didn’t go mainstream, till about 1993, when the first popular web browser was released and when CERN helped adoption of the internet as a platform by making the software needed for accessing the web, open source and free.
Of course, while Lee’s initial use for the platform was for sharing scientific knowledge and ideas, it certainly got the ball rolling.
