Last week a story called “The First Web Page, Amazingly, Is Lost” by Geoff Brumfiel was reported on npr.org (you can listen to it at the link provided) in which it explains that a team at the CERN lab where the first web page was invented, and has since been lost, is attempting to restore it by searching for old hard drives and floppy disks that may hold missing copies.
The story recalls how it all began:
The story of the Web began in 1989 at a European particle physics laboratory called CERN. Hundreds of the world’s smartest scientists were putting together huge experiments to hunt for new particles. They worked in teams; each scientist would build one little part “” a circuit board or a piece of software. Then they’d put it all together.
Tim Berners-Lee was working at the lab as a computer scientist, and he noticed a growing problem: Files from one computer rarely worked on another because researchers were coding information in different formats for different operating systems. “So, in fact, often you just had to go into the corridor and buy [the other guy] a coffee to find out how things worked,” Berners-Lee says.
And from this frustration, the Web was born.
It ends with an appeal to readers to help locate the lost web page.
The post was shortly followed by a comment from Paul Jones who wrote:
“I have a copy of the page that Tim used as a demo at Hypertext 91 in San Antonio…My own first page, done on a NeXT cube was a variation of this page done under Tim’s direction. Enjoy. I believe I have more on the cube…”
The copy had been uploaded to ibiblio.org more than 20 years ago.
Unfortunately Jones’s copy was not what CERN was looking for but is believed to be the closest to the original web page ever found.
Click here to find out what it looks like.
Source: Mashable
