What was the world's first website?

In a world where the Internet is an integral part of people's lives and where there are more than a billion active sites, it's hard to imagine a time when there was only one site on the Web.

First went

In 1991, on August 6, the first website appeared, without any high-profile ads launched by the creator of the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee at that time worked in CERN - the famous physical laboratory in Switzerland. The world's first website explained what the World Wide Web is and what its capabilities are. A few years later there were such sites as eBay, Amazon and Google, and the Internet changed the life of the whole world, allowing us to communicate in new ways and find the necessary information.

A world without the Internet

During his work at CERN throughout the 1980s, the scientist constantly noticed how difficult it is to monitor all the projects and computer systems of thousands of researchers, many of whom have worked abroad. At that time a separate piece of information was stored on a separate computer, and to get the necessary data, you had to connect to several computers, while often studying different operating systems and programs.

How was the web created?

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invited his leaders to create a system for storing and transferring information between different computers using hypertext (links) and a network called the Internet. The boss called the proposal "intriguing, but vague" and denied the scientist development.

A year later, Tim Berners-Lee in the company of the Belgian engineer Robert Cayo, also an employee of the Swiss laboratory, finalized the idea and received time and funding for the development of the project. Among the first names were "Information Management", "Information Warehouse" and "Information Cell", but Berners-Lee stopped on the "World Wide Web" (WorldWideWeb).

By the end of the 20th century, Berners-Lee, at the head of the team of programmers and computer engineers, developed the main technologies on which the modern Internet is based: the HTML for page creation, the HTTP data transfer protocol, the URL URL universal locator and the application is a primitive Internet browser with software.

Free access

The beginning of the Internet as a free access database came on August 6, 1991, when Berners-Lee launched the first site with information about the network and the World Wide Web project. The first hosting site was the working computer of its creator, located in CERN.

Tim Berners-Lee declined the offer to patent his technology, insisting that the Internet should be free and freely available to develop as quickly and dynamically as possible. He still claims that if technology was patented, the Internet would never grow to the present scale, because it is impossible to create a universal world space and at the same time retain full control over it.

The growth of the Internet

In 1993, scientists at the University of Illinois developed an Internet browser called Mosaic, which became popular among ordinary users of the network. In 1994, Yahoo appeared, and a year later eBay and Amazon. Google modestly entered the Internet arena in 1998. By the time the Facebook was created, the World Wide Web already had 51 million active sites. Today there are more than one billion.

Creature Laurels

In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he organized the World Wide Web Council, an organization that supports technological standards for the Internet. Despite Berners-Lee's desire to remain out of the sight of journalists, Time Magazine named him one of the most influential people of the 20th century. In 2004, the "father of the Internet" was knighted by the Queen of Great Britain, Elizabeth II.