World's 1st website turns 20, regains original address

As it turned 20, the world's first website received an appropriate birthday gift: its original web address. CERN, which devised the fundamental standards of the web, restored the first ever website to its original URL.

"The website, obviously very scarce by today's standards, contains only text explaining some of the basics of the World Wide Web," tech site Mashable noted. Mashable also noted that while the first website was technically launched in 1991, "it was on April 30, 1993 when CERN made the WWW technology available on a royalty-free basis." What did the first website contain? Not much, by today's standards: "When the first website was born, it was probably quite lonely. And with few people having access to browsers – or to web servers so that they could in turn publish their own content – it must have taken a visionary leap of faith at the time to see why it was so exciting. The early WWW team, led by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, had such vision and belief. The fact that they called their technology the World Wide Web hints at the fact that they knew they had something special, something big," CERN's Dan Noyes noted in a blog post. Mashable also noted that for many years, the URL of the world's first website had been redirecting users to http://info.cern.ch. But now, CERN has uploaded the 1992 copy of the site, the oldest it could find so far. — LBG, GMA News