The web was born at CERN: 1989 and 1993
Published
In a nutshell
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989, and by the end of 1990 the first web server and browser were running there. The web was meant to let scientists in universities and institutes around the world share information automatically.
On 30 April 1993 CERN put the web software into the public domain. That decision allowed anyone to use and build on it, and the web spread far beyond science.
2A problem of physicists
CERN works with scientists from many countries, who need to share results, documents and data. The web was Berners-Lee’s answer: a way to link information held on different computers so that it could be found and read from anywhere.
The web and the internet are not the same thing. The internet is the network that connects computers; the web is a system of linked pages that runs on top of it.
3The first website
The first website was about the web project itself, and it ran on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer at CERN. In November 1990 Berners-Lee and the Belgian engineer Robert Cailliau formalised the project in a management proposal, and in August 1991 Berners-Lee announced the software on internet newsgroups, after which interest spread around the world. CERN has since restored the first website, so that it can be read again at its original address.
41993: free for everyone
On 30 April 1993 CERN released the web software into the public domain. Later it also made a release available under an open licence, which CERN describes as a better way to make it as widely available as possible. Anyone could now run a web server or a browser without asking permission or paying for it.
5Why it matters for Geneva
The web is one of the clearest examples of how basic research pays off in unexpected ways. It was not the goal of CERN, whose field is particle physics, but it came from the needs of an international laboratory. More about CERN is in the Science section, and the story sits beside the first planet found around a sun-like star in Discoveries.
Sources
- CERN, The birth of the Web, checked 29 October 2026
- CERN, A short history of the Web, checked 29 October 2026
- CERN, Our history, checked 29 October 2026