World’s first website recreated by Cern
The world’s first ever web page has been recreated by a team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) as part of efforts to preserve the hardware and software which gave birth to the now ubiquitous network.
Developed by Sir Tim Berners Lee the sites restoration is intended to rekindle awareness of the webs founding ideals, which championed decentralised control and free access to information by all, aspects which have dimmed with time.
In addition to hosting the site itself period computers have been enlisted to run the original software to make the experience as authentic as possible.
The result is a primitive twenty year old page of text which harks back to a simpler age, although enthusiasts claim that the ability to write directly onto web pages, a facility conspicuously absent from present day servers, was ahead of its time.
Speaking to the BBC James Gillies, Cern’s head of communications, said: “One of my dreams is to enable people to see what that early web experience was like.
"You might have thought that the first browser would be very primitive but it was not. It had graphical capabilities. You could edit into it straightaway. It was an amazing thing. It was a very sophisticated thing."
Cern famously signed away their ownership rights to the technology to the world for free, clearing the way for the World Wide Web as we know it today.