CERN celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Web - The Republic

To celebrate the first internet page of history the scientific establishment on 30 April 1993, open the email network in the world, has decided to restore it and repost it. It was a guidebook for those who wanted to look out on the network that was born

FRANCESCO caccavella Among the decisions worthy of ending up in the history books, the one that CERN taken on April 30, 1993, exactly twenty years ago, is one of those that was likely to be ignored. That day the entity Geneva decided to release for free and for all the World Wide Web, the information system designed in its laboratories for some years under the pressure of the English physicist Tim Berners-Lee. From that project, made up of software, languages, communication protocols, was born on the Web as we know it today.

To celebrate the day, and to prevent the inspiration of those days disappear from memory, CERN has launched the project ” First Website “which aims to preserve all the digital elements that contributed to the formation of the first Web: the computer used to host the site, the software that is then used to navigate through the pages, the IP address of the first server, the program to create web pages and everything that serves to recreate the spirit of those early years.

The first step taken by the project was the republication, at the same address used twenty years ago, the first website designed and published by the team of Berners-Lee (the group W3). Typing on the browser address http://info.cern.ch you can make a jump in the early 90s (the copy is published in 1992) and browse the prehistory of the Web You can view information about the project developed at CERN , the stages of its history, technical information on how to use the browser.

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First Website of the objectives is also to make available the software with which you logged in to the Web at the time. Next to surfers that displayed only text documents in 1992 were already available different software can navigate between documents containing images and that functionality that has now been lost, not only allowed to read documents, but also to write them and publish them.

Digging up the spirit of the pioneers of the Web has not only one archival purposes. Reread and relive the story of how it came into the tool with which you are reading this article also serves to preserve the principles which have inspired the birth. The initial idea of ??the group W3, ie a system of management of the information produced by the experiments at CERN in Geneva, turned almost immediately into a utopia: a large global catalog in which all the information produced by the human race were correlated between them in turn to create new knowledge.

Scrolling through those first few pages back online so you can understand why Berners-Lee predicted that the browser you used to read the information published by the sites also had to serve, in turn, to publish content. The Web could become a collective intelligence by not only linking the information with links, but also allowing everyone to publish them.

And you can also understand why it was expected that the information and data published were, according to this view , remain free and public and do not shut the computers of companies and organizations that use them, as in the case of the major social networks, only for private purposes.

A trend in which the same Berners-Lee is fighting for years promoting the concept of open and linked data: a space in which hypertext information and content are not intended to remain closed in the “walled gardens” of individual services, but released (open) and made understandable to computers, services automatic machines to digital processing (linked).

In this new Web, the “Web of data”, the links between pages do not happen, but between different data sources. In this way a small piece of information can be read, mixed, split automatically, and then used to create new meanings and new information, enabling knowledge in science, in politics, in society. And it is precisely the way to this perspective, much more similar to the original idea, that the project First Website indicates today at all.