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15 Facts You (Probably) Didn’t Know About the Birth of the Internet

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By: joekobersy

December 30, 2017

The Internet has greatly become an axiom in our daily lives, but that wasn't the case some 25 years ago when we lived without the Internet. It would be interesting to glimpse a quick look at the birth of the whole-nine-yards of World Wide Web, which all invented by a British Knight!
  1. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (AKA TimBL) made the first successful client/server communication using HTTP around mid-November 1989 while working on a proposal for an information management system.
  2. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol, best known as HTTP, was initiated by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989.
  3. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first ever website (still available here: http://bit.ly/the1stpage).
  4. The first web browser and editor (named WorldWideWeb, and later Nexus), was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in during the second half of 1990 and was used to view the first website.
  5. info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever website and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN.
  6. The first website was hosted on Tim’s computer, which was a NeXT computer (pictured below).
  7. NeXT computer was the company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985.
  8. While inventing and working on setting up the Web, Berners-Lee spent most of his working hours in Building 31 at CERN.
  9. In January 1991 the first Web servers outside CERN itself were switched on.
  10. On August 6, 1991, the first website of CERN (link above) was put online but was only available for new users as of August 23, 1991
  11. The website was taken down in 1993 by CERN for the content being irrelevant.
  12. The first website was lost, but Paul Jones of UNC-Chapel Hill in North Carolina revealed in May 2013 that he has a copy of a page sent to him in 1991 by Berners-Lee.
  13. Jones stored the plain-text page, with hyperlinks, on a floppy disk and on his NeXT Computer
  14. CERN put the oldest known web page back online in 2014, complete with hyperlinks that helped users get started and helped them navigate what was then a very small web.
  15. The first popular graphical web browser was ViolaWWW, created by Pei-Yuan Wei from Taiwan, a University of California graduate. It was first released around April 1992, was the first web browser with inline graphics, scripting, tables, stylesheet.
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