Check out the 1st web page, which went public 25 years ago today

What did web pages look like 25 years ago? Well, 25 years ago today, there was only one that the public could see – the very first.

And it wasn’t much more than a few pages of text with some hyperlinks – describing what the World Wide Web was envisioned to be.

The official launch of the World Wide Web to the public on Aug. 23, 1991 has been named “Internaut Day,” which is now celebrated annually.

The first web page was created by Tim-Berners Lee, a British scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located on the French-Swiss border near Geneva. The page went live at CERN on Dec. 20, 1990 and was opened up to the high-energy physics community on Jan. 10, 1991. But it wasn’t until August of that year that Berners-Lee made the project public by posting a summary of the project on several online forums, lastly on Aug. 22.

In 2013, CERN restored the site to how it looked in 1992.

Berners-Lee later developed a working prototype web server and browser on a powerful computer made by NeXT inc., a company started by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs that failed after just a few years.

The first web page was originally hosted on this NeXT workstation, shown here as displayed in 2005 at Microcosm, the public science museum at CERN. (Wikimedia Commons)

The first web page was originally hosted on Berners-Lee’s computer, which is still at CERN, but no longer online.

Before the world wide web, other protocols existed for transferring information over the internet, but the web quickly surpassed them in popularity.