For a few weeks now, we at Team Alaturka have been thinking about a new, updated layout with revised content and menu navigation for our cultural travel journal; the range of topics is now too broad and diverse.

Technical development with reduced programming effort for the content management program, or CMS for short, faster and more powerful computers, and even the display on the “screen” almost make this step mandatory. Reason enough to spend a little time with the Internet itself, because a big birthday has just been celebrated: the first website was put online almost exactly 20 years ago.

Researcher Tim Berners-Lee lays the foundation for www

Today it is hard to believe that it was only on April 30, 1993 that Tim Berners-Lee put the first website online on the World Wide Web (www), which was freely accessible to everyone. What a short period of time when you consider that there are now more than 14 billion websites worldwide. The British researcher Berners-Lee had already developed and presented a proposal for a networked information system in March 1989, which would form the foundation for today's World Wide Web. Berners-Lee didn't put a lot of effort into putting his first presentation online, no flash graphics, no GIFs and no music. A few explanatory texts supplemented by a few links, that's it. Today this first website can be found online again, and there are even plans to set up a kind of Internet museum.

CERN releases technology for everyone to use

From today's perspective, it is also surprising that it was the European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN) that released the technology of the World Wide Web with public access and the resulting use for everyone. So, understandably, this first website is now a valuable historical artifact. CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is a large research facility near Meyrin in the canton of Geneva in Switzerland, where basic physical research into the structure of matter is carried out using large particle accelerators. On the main site near Meyrin, near the border with France, huge accelerator rings and underground experimental sites were set up, which are geographically located on French territory, but administratively belong to Switzerland. Due to CERN's agreements with Switzerland and France, no national law applies on the CERN site, which is why all lawsuits that have so far taken place to end the experiments, which many citizens describe as dangerous, have regularly been dismissed by the courts as not having jurisdiction.

Tim Berners-Lee can be reached again at the original URL

The technical foundations for the Internet were initially created at CERN, actually developed exclusively to improve communication between scientists so that research results could be exchanged more quickly. The very idea that the World Wide Web would not exist is hardly conceivable today, quite apart from the huge network with billions in sales and therefore millions of jobs that made it possible.

It is therefore only understandable that CERN is now beginning to organize and archive the digital heritage from the history of the creation of the www. An archive is to be created at the internet address info.cern.ch that presents the historical development of the internet on the internet. As a special highlight of this presentation, Tim Berners-Lee's first website will be available again under the original URL.

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