The first websites in the world – CompuServe, I remember that name

The first websites are practically ancient history looking from our modern perspective, but how exciting had it been to create the first website in the world?

Now we have so many that supply us with vast amounts of information. Do you wonder which companies might have launched the first websites?

Here you can find out which were the first websites, all created before 1995.

The web’s logo designed by Robert Cailliau

1991 – CERN

The CERN website was first announced on 6 of August 1991, and in November 1991 it was pronounced to be the first website in the world: World Wide Web CERN. It was created by the English computer scientist Sir Timothy Berners-Lee. He made his proposal for an information management system in 1989. And at the end of the year, he basically put into action the first relation between Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server thanks to the Internet.

Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Abramatic and Tim Berners-Lee at the 10th anniversary of the WWW Consortium. Photo credit

After a visit to CERN, Paul Kunz from SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) impressed with the WWW project, implemented it in his institution. So as of December 1991, SLAC website was the second in the world and the first in North America.

The NeXTcube used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server. Photo credit

1992 – A few more

Following the example of CERN and SLAC, a few institutions implemented the information management system. Such are the Fermilab – the second website in North America, the website of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), SunSITE – archiving project, Ohio State University and Nikhef which was the third website in the world.

They all had their inventions and improvements in that short interval of time as they were created and developed.

NCSA Mosaic 3.0 for Windows

1993 – Research by Matthew Gray at MIT shows that by the end of 1993 there were 623 websites created.

In this year there were the websites of Bloomberg – the first financial portal supplying information on markets and currency conversion; of Chabad – an outreach and networking site for Jews from all around the world; There was also the first webcomic – Doctor Fun; MTV; The Tech; PARC… and many others.

CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its acronym CIS) was the first major commercial online service in the United States, on which the first webcomic was published

So by that time a web searcher was necessary. And there it was – ALIWEB (Archie Like Indexing for the Web) was the first search engine in the world. It was announced by the end of 1993 and launched in 1994.

1994 – The year that started with 2738 websites and ended with 10,000. From now on it becomes difficult to follow the wave of websites, but some of the most popular websites of this year are HotWired, Enterzone, The Economist, CORDIS, Amnesty International, Art. Net and many others.