The world's first website info.Cern.ch, created by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, went live at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland on December 20, 1990. Later it was made public on August 6, 1991.
| Home page of world's first website Image Credit: CERN |
| World's first webpage Image Credit: CERN |
The first web page put up on the website was here which describes the basic features of the web; how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server.
| Cover page of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for WWW in March 1989 Image Credit: CERN |
| Tim's Next computer which was used to create world's first website Image Credit: CERN |
On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to develop a distributed information system based on typed links. Although the proposal attracted little interest, Berners-Lee was encouraged by his boss, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing web system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation which is one of Steve Jobs’ early products. He considered several names, including Information Mesh, The Information Mine or Mine of Information, but settled on World Wide Web.
By October of 1990, Tim had built fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s web: HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), first browser/web page editor (WorldWideWeb.app) and the first web server (CERN httpd).
On December 20, 1990, the first web page was served on the open internet within CERN and after 8 months, website was made publicly available on August 6, 1991.
Until The launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, WWW was accessed by a decidedly small audience. In 1994 Tim moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community devoted to developing open web standards.
According to 2014 survey by Netcraft, There are over 1 billion websites on the world wide web today and approximately 140,000 websites created on every day.
References: Telegraph, Wikipedia
