Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor
(Image: CERN)

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

home.cern,Accelerators
Screenshot of the recreated page of the first website (Image: CERN)

The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. In 2013, CERN launched a project to restore this first ever websiteinfo.cern.ch.

On 30 April 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. Later, CERN made a release available with an open licence, a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. These actions allowed the web to flourish.

Discover the World Wide Web’s humble beginnings with this earliest incarnation
Surf the Web using a recreation the first browser that was written in 1990
The line-mode browser, launched in 1992, was the first readily accessible browser for the Web

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