On August 6, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the first site born on the Internet. But that is the date (1991) on which the site was made accessible to anyone with a connection to the Net.
For CERN scientists had gone online a few months earlier, on December 20, 1990. It was hosted by Tim Berners-Lee’s personal Next computer, which he had the World Wide Web project developed (the proposal is dated November 12, 1990), and it was very simple. In 2013 Cern made it usable again as it was in 1990 (at this address).
In fact it was a guide to the nascent Web: it explained how to access documents and how to install a server to host other sites. There was not even a photograph or even an image, even the World Wide Web logo. Nothing. A list with some links. Berners-Lee himself will explain this choice by saying that the clarity of the words was the most important thing: “In this project we focus on having a text that everyone can understand, rather than graphics”.
Thirty-one years later, there are nearly two billion sites: on average, 12 have been added every minute since that day.
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