30 years of the World Wide Web: what was the first web page of history and what was it used for?

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The first web page of the story is an experience that can be disappointing. I did not have any colors, no pictures, no videos. There were no graphics or animations either. Only text, hypertext and a set of menus a little confusing. Many would say that it's a can.

But thanks to this first website, we can now ask Google all our questions, use Facebook and access millions of web pages.

The World Wide Web (the Web) was born at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Physics, in Geneva, Switzerland.
by British engineer and physicist Tim Berners-Lee as a data exchange system among the 10,000 scientists working for the institution.

Today, it is an immeasurable and intangible network of documents, images and protocols that constitute the network of information that is growing by leaps and bounds.

This Tuesday, March 12 marks the 30th anniversary of its creation. This is the day that Berners-Lee described the hypertext transfer protocol that would lead to this first website: "Information Management, a Proposal". More than a year later, on December 20, 1990,
It would be published for the first time at CERN (with the help of Belgian Robert Cailliau) and outside its walls in August 1991.

But let's put things in context. At that time, Windows and Google Chrome still did not exist and the few personal computers on the market worked in a complex and visual way.

The Web, in the Internet

Internet was only used to use email and transfer files. And the connections were badog, which meant you had to be patient with downloading the information.

For those who are used to surfing the Web at 3G and 4G speeds or who find it unbearable that the Internet is "suspended" in the middle of a film, returning to the era of creating the first website can be a real exercise tolerance to frustration

And the fact is that the rapid evolution of technology that makes the Internet possible makes us easily forget what the early versions of the Web and their sad gray text boxes looked like.

Since then, the Web has changed a lot: HTML has evolved, HTTP has evolved and browsers have been modernized.

Perhaps one of the first things that catch your eye the first time you access it is that there was no address bar. There were no pictures or sounds either.

Mark Sendall, at the head of Berners-Lee at the time, called the project a "vague but exciting proposal".

Later, in 1994, Berners-Lee will create the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to maintain common standards for network operation.

And in 1998, he was thinking about the process that had helped him create it with these words: "If you think that surfing a hypertext is a good idea, it's because you've never been tried to write it. " "The first website imagined a simple client-server architecture, links and a six-month timeframe," says CERN on its website.

If you want to test yourself and see this rudimentary Web, you can do it
thanks to a project developed by a group of CERN developers and web designers. Scientists have created a version of this original protocol accessible from any modern browser. "Click to grab it (and remember that you have to double click on the links," they recommend.