Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a big deal as far as Internet fame goes since he invented the world wide web. He was working for CERN when he created the first web page, so now CERN is preserving his effort. To celebrate twenty years of the world wide web, CERN has preserved the original web page and the hardware and software used to create it.
Why is preserving the first web page important? Dan Noyes, the web manager for CERN’s communication group says:
I want my children to be able to understand the significance of this point in time: the web is already so ubiquitous – so, well, normal – that one risks failing to see how fundamentally it has changed. We are in a unique moment where we can still switch on the first web server and experience it. We want to document and preserve that.
The web has grown into such a pervasive part of our lives that it’s easy to forget that it really hasn’t been around very long. It’s come a long way. How long? Take a look at the first web page, http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. That was the state of things twenty years ago. Compare that to the page you’re reading now.
CERN is preserving not only that site, but seemingly anything they can be tied to the development of the web. Want to read Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the web? They have that. The whole project is being housed at the original web address info.cern.ch, and it’s definitely worth checking out seeing as it contains the history of the web, as well as CERN’s plans to preserve that history.
(via info.cern.ch)
- The web is twenty years old, but the TCP/IP is thirty
- Berners-Lee thinks web access is now a basic human right
- Banner ads started in the 90’s and even the guys who made the first one hate them
