Explore

Firsts and accidents · 16 of 25

Firsts and accidents

The first website is still online

Did you know the world's first website is still online?

· 27-sec read

"This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"

The first website, at info.cern.ch, was about the World Wide Web project itself and ran on Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. To keep anyone from switching it off, the machine had a red handwritten label: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" Berners-Lee announced the WWW software publicly on August 6, 1991; on April 30, 1993 CERN put the web software in the public domain, and in 2013 it restored the original site.

Why it matters

Open licensing was a growth strategy: CERN's 1993 public-domain release let the web spread.

Sources

High confidence

Checked October 20, 2026.

  1. A short history of the Web (CERN) home.cern
  2. Web history timeline (CERN Web@30) web30.web.cern.ch