The world’s first website turns 33 and still works in a browser today

The very first website in history, launched on August 6, 1991, remains operational today. The page, called The World Wide Web Project, was created by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, and that date is widely considered the birthday of the World Wide Web.

Initially, the resource was designed for internal use at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Its pages contained information about the WWW technology that Berners-Lee had conceived back in 1989. Today, the site hosted at info.cern.ch is still open for viewing, though it looks remarkably modest: just text with hyperlinks and no images at all.

The top of the page states that WorldWideWeb (W3) is a global hypermedia information-retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents. Since the site went live, the internet has come a long way: both the underlying technologies and the devices people use to go online have changed dramatically.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the W3C consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bringing together various companies to develop the standards and recommendations used across the internet. That move sparked rapid growth of the Web, turning it into the infrastructure modern life can no longer do without.