15th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

The world wide web celebrated its 15th anniversary yesterday, April 30. It was back on this day in 1993 that the web was put in the public domain by CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire or European Council for Nuclear Research). In doing so, CERN renounced IP rights to the web but no one else could claim them either.

The world wide web was created by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN in 1989. The initial project was dubbed ENQUIRE (referring to Enquire Within Upon Everything, a book Berners-Lee recalled from his childhood). The world's first web site, http://info.cern.ch, went live in 1991. The content is clearly different today. A copy of the original first webpage created by Berners-Lee can be found here. The basic structure for the internet known as the ARPANet and DARPANet had been around since the 1960's and 70's and was created by DARPA.


CERN Declaration (Source: BBC)

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