On this day 25 years ago the world's first website went live to the public. The site, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was a basic text page with hyperlinked words that connected to other pages.

On this day 25 years ago the world's first website went live to the public. The site, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was a basic text page with hyperlinked words that connected to other pages.

Berners-Lee used the public launch to outline his plan for the service, which would come to dominate life in the twenty-first century.

"The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system," said Berners-Lee on the world's first public website. "The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone."

Berners-Lee wanted the World Wide Web to be a place where people could share information across the world through documents and links navigated with a simple search function.

The NeXT computer Sir Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web is still housed at CERN CREDIT: CERN

The first step to making that a reality occurred on August 6, 1991, and was hailed with little fanfare when Berners Lee launched the first web page from his NeXT computer at CERN's headquarters in Geneva.

Housed at http://info.cern.ch, the founding website contained basic instructions for how the web worked, including how to access documents and set up your own server. CERN reinstated the page at its original address in 2013.

The genesis of the web

Another date rivals today as the actual birthday of the World Wide Web: March 12, 1989, the day Berners-Lee published his proposal for what he then called “Information Management”.

Primarily a business proposal, Berners-Lee conceived of the web as a way to prevent information loss in businesses and the scientific community.

At the time, he was working as a computer programmer at CERN's European Organisation for Nuclear Research, where he'd seen countless amounts of data lost because of high staff turnover and poor communication. And he'd looked on as researchers wasted weeks solving problems only to find out it had been tackled years earlier.

"The problems of information loss may be particularly acute at CERN, but in this case, CERN is a model in miniature of the rest of the world in a few years time. CERN meets now some of the problems which the rest of the world will have to face soon," said Berners-Lee.

His solution was a "universal linked information system" in which a network of documents linked to one another in a simple way that anyone could navigate to find exactly what they need.

Berners-Lee's boss at CERN, Mike Sendall, wrote a note on the proposal: "Vague but exciting", before giving it the go-ahead. 

First website as seen through an interface that mimics the early Line Mode Browser written by Nicola Pellow  CREDIT: CERN

Within a year and a half, just before Christmas in 1990, Berners-Lee had built the infrastructure for the web and designed the first web page. He wrote the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which outlined how information would travel between computers, and HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which was used to create the first web pages.   

He also wrote the text for the first website that described the project and how others could get involved. 

The site went live on August 6, 1991, and was housed on Berners-Lees' NeXT computer, the first server, which had a note taped to the front that said: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN". 

One of the first practical uses of Berners-Lee's creation was an internal phone book for CERN employees, which Bernd Pollermann uploaded soon after it went live. The following year the first picture was uploaded to the web: a kitsch image of CERN's all-female parody pop band Les Horribles Cernettes. 

In 1993, the World Wide Web was made publicly available through an open licence, meaning anybody could run a server and build sites. As a result, a library of material soon amassed and early competitors, such as University of Minnesota's paid-for Gopher, were stamped out. 

The same year saw the release of the elegant Mosaic browser, and the first ever World Wide Web conference, known as the "Woodstock of the web", at CERN. 

Berners-Lee's first browser in 1993 CREDIT: CERN

The next phase

A quarter of a century later, the web is dominated by social networks, search engines and online shopping sites. It has evolved beyond static web pages, and is now made up of interactive sites coded in new languages, and packed with photos, videos and moving parts. 

From here, we can expect the web to continue to leak from the computer screen into the real world, with the rise of the internet of things, biometirc logins and superfast connection speeds hailing a new era for the World Wide Web. 

·       1960s

The term 'online' is coined for the first time

Doug Engelbart prototypes an "oNLine System" (NLS) which does hypertext browsing editing, email, and so on. He invents the mouse for this purpose. Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext in A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate. 1965. See also: Literary Machines.

Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS in 1967.

·       1980

The seeds are sown

While consulting for CERN June-December of 1980, scientist Tim Berners-Lee writes a notebook program, 'Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything', which allows links to be made between arbitrary nodes.

Each node had a title, a type, and a list of bidirectional typed links. "ENQUIRE" ran on Norsk Data machines under SINTRAN-III.

·       12 March 1989

Tim Berners-Lee submits a proposal for a distributed information system at CERN

Berners-Lee writes a proposal to develop a distributed information system for the laboratory. "Vague, but exciting” was the comment that his supervisor, Mike Sendall, wrote on the cover, and with those words, gave the green light.

·       20 December 1990

The world's first website goes live at CERN

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had defined the Web’s basic concepts, the URL, http and html, and he had written the first browser and server software.

Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first website and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN.

The site centred on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information.

·       10 January 1991

The web extends to the high-energy-physics community

In 1991, an early WWW system was released to the high-energy-physics community via the CERN program library. It included the simple browser, web server software and a library, implementing the essential functions for developers to build their own software. A wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. A little later it was made generally available via the internet, especially to the community of people working on hypertext systems.

·       6 August 1991

Berners-Lee posts a summary of the project

Berners-Lee posts a summary of the project on several internet newsgroups, including alt.hypertext, which a site for hypertext enthusiasts. The move marked the debut of the web as a publicly available service on the internet.

·       12 December 1991

The web pitches up in the US

The first web server outside of Europe was installed on 12 December 1991 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released its Mosaic browser, which was easy to run and install on ordinary PCs and Macintosh computers.

The steady trickle of new websites became a flood. The world’s First International World-Wide Web conference, held at CERN in May, was hailed as the “Woodstock of the web”.

·       30 April 1993

CERN gives away the WorldWideWeb source code

CERN issued a statement putting the Web into the public domain, ensuring that it would remain an open standard.

The organisation released the source code of Berners-Lee's hypertext project, WorldWideWeb, into the public domain the same day. WorldWideWeb became free software, available to all.

The move had an immediate effect on the spread of the web. By late 1993 there are over 500 known web servers, and the web accounts for 1 per cent of internet traffic.

Berners-Lee moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from where he still runs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

·       June 1995

Exponential growth

The graph above shows the load on the first Web server (info.cern.ch) which was1000 times what it has been theree years earlier.

By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers - of which 2000 were commercial - and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the collected works of Shakespeare every second.

·       1 October 1994

Berners-Lee founds the World Wide Web Consortium

In October 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory for computer science – in collaboration with CERN and with support from DARPA and the European Commission.