The First Website: How a "Vague but Exciting" Memo Became the Web
In 1989 a physicist at CERN got tired of losing track of information. Twenty months later, info.cern.ch was online.
By the InterStalgia history desk · November 14, 2026
The internet already existed in 1989. Email worked, Usenet newsgroups were busy, and researchers moved files around with FTP. What didn't exist was a simple way to jump from one document to another on a different computer. If you wanted something, you had to know which machine it lived on, log in, and go dig for it.
Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer at CERN, the physics laboratory near Geneva, ran into that problem every day. Physicists from all over the world worked with CERN, on different kinds of computers that couldn't easily share anything, and the documents they produced were hard to find again. In 1980, during an earlier contract there, he had built a personal program called ENQUIRE that linked notes about people and software together. Every new page had to link to an existing one. It was a small idea that would get much bigger.
A memo with a famous note on top
In March 1989 he handed his boss, Mike Sendall, a document called "Information Management: A Proposal." It described a "large hypertext database with typed links": documents on many machines, connected by links you could follow with a click. Sendall wrote three words on the cover that CERN still quotes today: "Vague but exciting..."
The proposal didn't get formal approval. What it got was more useful. Sendall let Berners-Lee buy a NeXT computer and quietly work on the idea alongside his regular job. Robert Cailliau, a Belgian engineer at CERN, became his biggest champion and helped write a more formal proposal in November 1990 for a project they called WorldWideWeb.
Three inventions in a few months
Berners-Lee's breakthrough was joining hypertext, which already existed in research labs, to the internet, which already connected those labs. To do it he needed three things, and he wrote all of them in the second half of 1990:
- URLs, a way to give every document a unique address (he first called them universal document identifiers).
- HTML, a simple way to mark up a page with headings and links.
- HTTP, the rules a browser uses to ask a server for a page.
He also wrote the first browser, called WorldWideWeb, which could edit pages as well as read them, and the first web server, which later became known as CERN httpd. Both ran on the NeXT machine in his office.
December 20, 1990
The first website, info.cern.ch, went live on December 20, 1990. Its pages described the project itself: what the web was, how to get a browser, and how to put your own documents online. It was a manual for a world that had exactly one website in it.
That world stayed small for a while. The WorldWideWeb browser only ran on NeXT computers, which few people owned, so Nicola Pellow, working with Berners-Lee at CERN, wrote the Line Mode Browser, a plain text version that worked on almost any terminal. In January 1991 the first web servers outside CERN came online. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the project to the alt.hypertext newsgroup and invited anyone to join in. That post is usually counted as the day the web became public.
A month later, Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited CERN, saw the web, and took the software home. SLAC's server, which put the lab's catalog of physics papers online, became the first website in North America.
The day CERN gave it away
In the early 1990s the web wasn't the obvious winner. The University of Minnesota's Gopher, released in 1991, let people browse documents through simple menus, and for a while it was more popular. Then in early 1993 Minnesota announced it would charge licensing fees for its Gopher server software.
Two months later, on April 30, 1993, CERN went the other way. It released the World Wide Web software into the public domain, free for anyone to use, copy or build on, with no fees and no permission needed. Developers who had been nervous about Gopher's licensing moved to the web, and they didn't move back.
That same year, two students at the University of Illinois, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, released Mosaic, a browser that showed pictures next to text and ran on ordinary Windows PCs and Macs. Within a year, web traffic had passed Gopher's. By June 1993 there were about 130 websites in the world. By June 1994 there were 2,738.
Where it went
Berners-Lee never patented any of it, and nobody owes a royalty to use it. He went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium, which still oversees the web's standards. The original info.cern.ch pages are still online at the same address, so you can read the web's first instructions the way people did in 1991.
The proposal itself sits in CERN's archives with Sendall's handwriting still on the cover. Vague, maybe. He was right about the exciting part.