seojeek

Gallery · Room 19 · Geneva, 1989–1993

The Web

A proposal at CERN that became linked pages anyone could publish, addressed by URL and fetched over HTTP.

A black NeXT monitor, keyboard and mouse beside a black cube-shaped computer on a white display table. A torn paper label on the cube is handwritten: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" The keyboard reads PROPRIETE CERN, and a worn green hardback book lies beside the mouse.

NeXT

The NeXT computer used as the first web server, 1990

Workstation

CERN, shown on loan at the Science Museum, London · View record ↗

Photo: Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Wall text

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, wrote "Information Management: A Proposal." It described a distributed hypertext system to stop the laboratory losing track of its information. His manager, Mike Sendall, wrote "Vague, but exciting" on it and agreed to buy a NeXT computer.

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had defined the Web's basic parts: HTML for writing pages, HTTP for fetching them and the URL for addressing them. The first website, info.cern.ch, explained the project itself. It ran on the NeXT, which was also the first web server. In August 1991 he announced the software on Internet newsgroups, and on 30 April 1993 CERN put it in the public domain.

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released Mosaic. It showed pictures inline with the text, instead of in a separate window, and helped carry the Web beyond scientists. Web pages began as structured documents. JavaScript, and later Ajax, which updates part of a page without reloading it, turned many of them into applications.

Palette · Sampled from the works shown

  • NeXT black

    #1C1C1C

  • Screen grey

    #40433A

  • Label paper

    #C6B199

  • Marker orange

    #D0906D

  • Book green

    #6A5F32

What changed

  • Any document could link to any other, on any server, by its URL

  • Anyone could write a server or a browser, with no fees due, once CERN released the software in 1993

  • Pictures appeared inline with the text, from Mosaic in 1993

  • Pages that began as documents became applications, updating in place with JavaScript and Ajax

More works

  • This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.

    Tim Berners-Lee

    Information Management: A Proposal, 1989

    Proposal to CERN management, March 1989, recirculated in May 1990

    W3C, the proposal as HTML · View source ↗

  • World Wide Web

    The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

    Tim Berners-Lee

    The World Wide Web project, 1992

    Web page, the first website as restored by CERN in 2013 from a 1992 copy

    info.cern.ch, CERN · View source ↗

What to borrow

  1. 01

    Give every view its own URL, so it can be linked, bookmarked and shared.

  2. 02

    Build the page as a working document first. Headings, text and links should make sense before any images or scripts load.

  3. 03

    Let the site explain itself. The first website explained what the Web was and how to use a browser and set up a server.

Sources