Twenty years ago today, something happened that changed the digital world forever: CERN published a statement that made the technology behind the World Wide Web available to use, by anybody, on a royalty-free basis.
That decision, pushed forward by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, transformed the internet, making it a place where we can all freely share anything and everything — from social media updates, through streamed music, to YouTube videos of cats. It has fundamentally shaped the way we communicate.
To celebrate the momentous occasion of 20 years ago, CERN — the same guys behind all those experiments at the Large Hadron Collider — has republished its very first website at its original URL. It’s not much to look at — but it’s a fine reminder of just how much the web has changed in the past 20 years.
In fact, the republishing of that site is part of a broader project to excavate and preserve a whole host of digital gems that remain from the inception of the web. You can go read a lot more about the project over on CERN’s site. [CERN]