On 6 August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, published the first website even made from a lab in Switzerland. It marked one of the most important milestones of information networks. As of today, the world’s first website is still up and running.

The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. It was a plain text website written in HTML. It outlined how to create Web pages and explained more about hypertext.

Back in 1989, Berners-Lee first proposed his idea for a worldwide network of computers sharing information, while he was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. He started the WorldWideWeb (WWW) project and wrote about the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that outlined how information or data would travel between computer systems, as well as, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that was used to create the first website.

The first web page was originally hosted on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer. He launched it on 6 August 1991 and revealed the WWW project to the public for the first time by posting a brief summary of the project to the alt.hypertext Usenet newsgroup.

In the beginning, only a decidedly small audience of fellow CERN researchers had web browser software to access to World Wide Web. It wasn’t until 1993, when web browser Mosaic was released, that the Web took off.

On 4 April 2017, Berners-Lee was awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Prize for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale. The Turing Prize called the “Nobel Prize of Computing” is considered one of the most prestigious awards in Computer Science.

As of today, Berners-Lee still devotes himself to the Web by being the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization that develops protocols and guidelines to lead the Web to its full potential, as well as a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.

Thanks to Berners-Lee, the world can access the Web freely. Let us take a moment to appreciate Berners-Lee’s contribution and say happy birthday to WWW!

Follow Tim Berners-Lee on Twitter: https://twitter.com/timberners_lee