Most of the web's foundational moments have vanished. The servers were unplugged, the code was lost, the pages 404'd into history. But the first website ever published is a striking exception: you can still read it today, more or less as it appeared when it went live on August 6, 1991. It is a plain, text-only page with a white background and blue hyperlinks, and it explains a brand-new idea called the World Wide Web.
One page that described itself
The author was Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva. By the end of 1990 he had quietly assembled the three technologies that still define the web: HTML for writing pages, HTTP for moving them between machines, and the URL for addressing any document on any server. The first website, hosted at the address info.cern.ch, was the web explaining itself - what hypertext was, how to browse it, and how to make your own pages.
It ran on a NeXT computer, the sleek black workstation designed by Steve Jobs's company during his years away from Apple. That single machine was the entire World Wide Web for a while. A handwritten label was stuck to its case: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" One unplugged cable would have taken the whole web offline.
