Opening a website and clicking a link is the easiest thing in the world now, but it wasn't like that 32 years ago. It might seem quite strange to think about how different life was before the World Wide Web (WWW). Going to the store for orders, going to the cinema to watch a movie, meeting friends only at cafes for a chat, or even communicating with distant friends through letters, or if you were lucky, a phone call.
It might be difficult to imagine now, but 32 years ago, the internet had just emerged in the sense we know it today. While the internet infrastructure had been developed earlier, public websites aren't actually from such a distant past.
The story of the internet began in the 1950s. Despite the negative consequences of the war, something useful was produced for the future, and the internet is one of those things. During the Cold War era, scientists and engineers were seeking a way to communicate data between computers. As they contemplated how communication could be maintained in case of hostile attacks, the first seeds of the internet were sown.
Founded in the 1950s in the United States, the internet was developed in the following decades, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, and it took on the form of today's internet in the late 1980s.
The first internet site is 32 years old at CERN
In the late 1980s, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, while working as a computer expert at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, initiated a project to facilitate information sharing. As a result of this project, a network was established that allowed access to information through links using hypertext. This network is what we now know as the "World Wide Web" or simply "WWW."
Through his work on the "World Wide Web," Tim Berners-Lee made progress in integrating enriched text documents into a functioning network system. This advancement marked the birth of the modern internet.
On December 20, 1990, Berners-Lee published the first web page containing a text that introduced the "World Wide Web" project. At that time, the web page, accessible only from within the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, couldn't fully fulfill its "www" mission.
The first internet site is 32 years old at CERN
By August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee's decision to open the site for external use marked a historic moment. The first example of what we now call web pages was launched, even though it lacked visuals.
The first website was published at the address http://info.cern.ch/. This site was a simple HTML page containing a few basic pieces of information. Its content included general information about the web, technical details about the WWW project, and information about how to create a web browser and server.
