It was more than two decades ago that the first web page launched, and if you’re curious what the web looked like back in 1991, CERN has preserved that original site for your perusing pleasure. Created by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT computer, the site was a place to find information about the new and exciting World Wide Web — “a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents,” as it was described.
Visit the very first webpage from more than 20 years ago
Check out the very first website from more than two decades ago.
Check out the very first website from more than two decades ago.


The preserved version has been around for some time, but isn’t an exact replica, however. CERN says that it’s a copy from 1992, and that “changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed.” Sadly no screenshots exist of the original page. Still, while it’s lacking in modern features like, say, images, it’s a nice reminder of how much the web has grown in a relatively short time, and a great example of preservation in the digital age.
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