The World’s First Website

I’ve been researching the history of the internet and the world wide web as part of an introductory chapter on the relevance of the cyberworld to international public relations and communication. These days, we use the internet everyday to browse websites and communicate with each other that it is almost unremarkable. So, it’s been almost Zen-like to stop a moment and contemplate the amazing revolution that quietly took place in the 1980s and 1990s through the work of scientists and researchers who were then unknown to the wider world, building applications for their own use.

It all begins with defence and the military back in the 1950s and 1960s during the Cold War. The Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 and the space race began. America saw the need for a nationwide network of communications as part of gaining the technological advantage. Over the next twenty years, computer-based communications networks were developed across university faculties and research facilities, connecting first universities in America and then including those in Europe.

Larry G. Roberts, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf and Radia Perlman are some of the scientists who developed the networks, protocols and algorithms on which development of the internet was founded. They paved the way for the interconnected infrastructure of computers and cables that we now refer to as the internet.

It was only in 1990 that the first website appeared, building on all the technology and research that had gone before. Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau, scientists working at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), developed hypertext in 1989, the links system that allows us to click on text on a webpage and be immediately taken to another webpage - and that we all now take for granted .

Tim Berners Lee is also credited with inventing the HTML mark-up language and the HTTP protocol that are the building blocks of dynamic webpages. At their very simplest:

HTML is the code that gives the instructions for the creation of a page eg. for the layout and functions. For example, to make text bold, you preface it with an instruction in brackets “< bold >” and end it with “< / bold>“. To make a link, you preface the link with “< a href= [insert the site you want to link to]>” and then close it off again with “.

The HTTP protocol gives us the address of the webpage - take a look at the address of this and any webpage and you will see it begins with “http://”.

Taking hypertext, HTML and HTTP together, the world’s first website was put up in 1991 and you can still see it today at http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
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It explains what the WorldWideWeb is - initially the phrase was conceived without spaces and referred to as W3 for short - and in a bold statement set out the founding ethics of the web: “The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone”. That core statement still resonates today in many of the debates about how websites, social media, information and creative products are used, shared and accessed online - all of which I will be exploring in more depth later as part of the book.

For now, let’s think back to 1991 and what we were doing back and how we were working while Berners-Lee and Cailliau were creating what seemed to be some fairly unremarkable few pages of text. I remember writing short stories on my Amstrad at home and watching as they installed computers running DOS at work so that the secretaries could learn how to word-process using WordPerfect. For communications, we relied on telephones, post and couriers. Faxes were fairly new-fangled and my friends laughed at me when I bought a fax for personal use. They also shied away from leaving voice messages when I bought an answer-machine with one large sized cassette tape for my outgoing message and another for incoming messages. Businesses sent out print brochures and hard copy mail or bought advertising space on print or broadcast media or billboards.

Within 10 years all our lives would be changed forever.

Photo: of Tim Berners-Lee thanks to hwsw.hu

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This post is part of my research project for the book New Trends in International Public Relations that I am co-authoring with business communications expert, Silvia Cambie. I am focusing on the social media aspects while she is working on the wider public relations issues.

You can find all my posts relating to this book project by clicking on the link in the sidebar New Trends in International PR under ZenGuide Projects.

If you have any comments or thoughts on any of the issues I’ve discussed in my posts, please do add a comment or email me. In particular, if you have any additional information or expertise that could add to the book, I would love to hear from you. Also, if you think that there are errors or inaccuracies in what I’ve said, I’d like to learn from you. I’ll credit you, of course, if your contribution is used directly in the book - you can check out my ongoing list of acknowledgements online. Please note that all contributions in respect of the book are subject to the terms set out in contributors release notice.