Restoring the first ever website

The website was hosted on Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer and described the basic features of the web, how to access other people’s documents and how to set up your own server.

The project requires rebuilding the site pretty much from scratch and ultimately the team hopes to preserve as many of the original assets of the site as possible by restoring the NeXT computer with the same hardware and even with the same IP addresses.

Screenshot of the original NeXT web browser in 1993

The research team hope that by preserving this technology and website that future generations will have somewhere to learn about how the web began. On their website they say “… we want to make http://info.cern.ch – the first web address – a destination that reflects the story of the beginnings of the web for the benefit of future generations.”

Learn more and keep up to date with their progress by visiting http://first-website.web.cern.ch/