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Source

From CBC.ca:

Today is the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web.

On April 30, 1993, researchers at the European Organzation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that they would turn the World Wide Web (or W3, as they called it), into a free and open source platform.

To celebrate the occasion, CERN has recreated the first publicly available free web page.

It's not much to look at – just black text on a white background, with some hyperlinks that send you to other pages (and some that don't actually work).

But it does offer a pretty amazing glimpse at where it all began. The page gives the public, circa 1993, an explanation of what the World Wide Web is: "a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents."

It's an accurate description of what the web was then, but it doesn't cover what it would become – there's no mention of cat videos, ridiculous memes, Twitter, Facebook, or trolling in comment sections.

There's also no mention of any corporate interests getting involved, and that's part of the point of this recreation, according to CERN's head of communications, James Gillies.

He told the BBC that without the World Wide Web, "you would have had web-like things but they would have belonged to Microsoft or Apple or Vodafone or whoever else. You would not have had a single open standard for everyone."

Back in 1993, CERN's management had serious discussions about whether the organization should work on remaining "the home of the web," or focus on its original mission of physics research.