The web began at CERN, a research facility for particle physics in Switzerland. Back in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, one of the people working at CERN, came up with the idea of the web as a way to make it easier for researchers to share information. The Internet already existed at this point, but it wasn't always easy or convenient to access all the computers connected to it.

Berners-Lee initially wrote a proposal for linking together documents within CERN using hypertext: documents where some words or phrases contained a link that loaded a different document. His supervisor famously gave him the go-ahead to develop the project by writing "vague, but exciting" on the proposal.

By 1993 Berners-Lee and his colleagues had not only developed the web concept to work across the entire Internet, but had persuaded CERN management to make the technology publicly available without any constraints or charges.

That led to the April 30th, 1993 publication of the first-ever web page, a document explaining what the web was and how it works. It didn't contain any graphics, multimedia, or text effects, other than a few links.

The page eventually went offline. However, CERN officials have now worked backwards to remember and figure out what it contained. They've now republished the page at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.

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