First Website Goes Online
The world's first website went live at CERN, created by Tim Berners-Lee
August 06, 1991
The First Page
On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted a short description of the World Wide Web project to an internet newsgroup, making the project publicly available and effectively putting the first website online. The site — info.cern.ch — explained what the web was, how to get a browser, and how to set up a web server. It had no images, no colors, no videos. Just text and hyperlinks. But those hyperlinks could connect to any other page on the web, anywhere in the world — and that was everything.
What Came Next
For the first year or two, the web was almost entirely used by physicists at CERN and a handful of universities. Then the Mosaic browser arrived in 1993, making web pages graphical and accessible to ordinary users. The number of websites went from one in 1991 to 10,000 by 1994, to a million by 1997, to over a billion today. Every website ever visited traces back to the server at CERN that Berners-Lee turned on in 1991.
The Original Address Still Works
CERN restored the original first website at its original address in 2013. You can still visit it. It remains exactly as it was — a plain page of text explaining how the web works and how to join it. The proposal that created it was written just two years earlier, in 1989. From one text page at a physics lab in Switzerland to over 1.5 billion websites today — the growth happened within a single human lifetime.