The World’s First Website Is Still Online

On August 6, 1991, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee published the world’s first website at CERN in Switzerland, at the address info.cern.ch. It had no colors, no images, and no animations, just black text on a white background and blue hyperlinks. The site explained what the World Wide Web is, how to create your own page, and how to search for information.

Interestingly, Berners-Lee deliberately chose not to patent his invention and made it freely available to the entire world. Had he decided otherwise, the internet we know today could have looked completely different.

In 2013, CERN restored the page, and today anyone can open it and see where it all began. There are now more than one billion websites in the world, and every one of them is built on the same HTML language.