On 6 August 1991, the very first website – a single page – was introduced to the world. Thirty years later, it’s almost impossible to remember a world without websites and we wonder what the team at Lake Solutions would have been doing as careers pre-1991, when websites didn’t exist?
In the summer of 1991, the British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee (largely credited with the development of the worldwide web as a whole) told a newsgroup for hypertext enthusiasts about his website project and provided instructions for obtaining the WWW software from CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), where he was based at the time.
It was a project which Sir Tim had taken a few years to develop but by 1991 he had developed URLs, HTML and HTTP – the building blocks so familiar nowadays for building websites.
In 1998, Sir Tim wrote: “One of the things computers have not done for an organisation is to be able to store random associations between disparate things, although this is something the brain has always done relatively well. In 1980 I played with programs to store information with random links, and in 1989, while working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory, I proposed that a global hypertext space be created in which any network-accessible information could be referred to by a single ‘Universal Document Identifier’.
Given the go-ahead to experiment by my boss, Mike Sendall, I wrote in 1990 a program called ‘WorldWideWeb’, a point and click hypertext editor which ran on the ‘NeXT’ machine. This, together with the first web server, I released to the High Energy Physics community at first, and to the hypertext and NeXT communities in the summer of 1991.”
Between the summers of 1991 and 1994, the load on the first web server ‘info.cern.ch’ rose steadily by a factor of ten every year. Sir Tim said at the time ‘the potential of the mixture of humans and machines working together and communicating through the web could be immense’.
The milestone of one billion websites was first reached in September of 2014 and, today, there are believed to be over 1.5 billion websites.
You can find a link to the first website here http://info.cern.ch and if you want help to create a website for today, just call our team here at Lake Solutions on 020 3397 3222.