World’s first web page up and running

Almost touching 25. Wondering what are we measuring or counting? It’s the world's first website. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee, the first web page went live at European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) on August 6, 1991. And the website still exists today.

The web page was dedicated to the information on the World Wide Web project and ran on a NeXT computer.

"When we link information in the web, we enable ourselves to discover facts, create ideas, buy and sell things, and forge new relationships at a speed and scale that was unimaginable in the analogue era,"wrote Berners-Lee in a piece published in Wired.

Amazingly this simple idea has led to the invention of today's best known global businesses, and irrevocably changed our social interactions with the world.

When Berners-Lee created the first website, the “internet” was a group of static documents, used almost exclusively by defence organisations and academic institutions. His proposal was supposed to allow electronic documents on the internet to be easily searched and shared.

The first ever web browser, called WorldWideWeb, was also created by Tim Berners-Lee. This browser had a nice graphical user interface; allowed for multiple fonts and font sizes; allowed for downloading and displaying images, sounds, animations, movies, etc.; and had the ability to let users edit the web pages being viewed in order to promote collaboration of information. However, this browser only ran on NeXT Step’s OS, which most people didn’t have because of the high cost of these systems.

In order to provide a browser anyone could use, the next browser he developed was much simpler and, thus, versions of it could be quickly developed to be able to run on just about any computer, pretty much regardless of processing power or operating system.

"I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it,” adds Tim.

"I actually wrote some programs to take information from one system and convert it so it could be inserted into another system. More than once. And when you are a programmer, and you solve one problem and then you solve one that's very similar, you often think, 'Isn't there a better way? Can't we just fix this problem for good?'

"That became 'Can't we convert every information system so that it looks like part of some imaginary information system which everyone can read?' And that became the World Wide Web."

Tim is a passionate advocate of the open web and net neutrality and has publicly campaigned against censorship of the web by governments.

He has also called for a new model of privacy on the web, where people legally own all their data on the web, so it cannot be used without their permission.