Believe it or not, there was a time before a website was a thing.
And today marks the 25th anniversary of the world’s first ever website, created by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1990.
Berners-Lee designed the site, which can still be found today at info.cern.ch, while he was a researcher at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Yes, that’s the same place which is now known as the home of the large Hadron Collider.
It was intended as a kind of directory for the internet, providing a guide to documents and pages which could be accessed by URLs.
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The website introduces the idea of the ‘link’, and states: “The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.
“Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists , Policy , November’s W3 news , Frequently Asked Questions.”
At the time it launched, the page was only accessible to CERN staff members, and wouldn’t go live to the public until August 1991.
The interent as it was then consisted of a group of documents which would be used by defence organisations and academic institutions.
Today, Berners-Lee directs the World Wide Web Consortium and is a strong advocate of net neutrality, the idea that service providers should not be able to decide whether certain areas of the web should be more accessible than others.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
