World’s first web page to be reborn
US: The world's first web page will be dragged out of cyberspace and
restored for today's Internet browsers as part of a project to celebrate
20 years of the Web, organisers said on Tuesday.
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had
begun recreating the website that launched that World Wide Web, as well
as the hardware that made the groundbreaking technology possible.
The world's first website was about the technology itself, according
to CERN, allowing early browsers to learn about the new system and
create their own web pages.
The project will allow future generations to understand the origin
and importance of the Web and its impact on modern life, CERN web
manager Dan Noyes told AFP.
“We're going to put these things back in place, so that a web
developer or someone who's interested 100 years from now can read the
first documentation that came out from the World Wide Web team,” he
said.
The project was launched to mark the 20th anniversary of CERN making
the World Wide Web available to the world for free.
British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, also
called W3 or just the Web, at CERN in 1989 to help physicists to share
information, but at the time it was just one of several such information
retrieval systems using the Internet.
“It's one of the biggest days in the history of the Web,” Noyes said
of April 30, 1993. CERN's gesture of giving away the Web for free was
what made it just explode.”
Noyes said that other information sharing systems that had wanted to
charge royalties, like the University of Minnesota's Gopher, had “just
sort of disappeared into history”.
By making the birth of the Web visible again, the CERN team aims to
emphasise the idea of freedom and openness it was built on, Noyes said.
“In the early days, you could just go in and take the code and make
it your own and improve it.
- HINDUSTAN TIMES
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