WorldWideWeb
The first Web browser, server and HTTP webpage become operational at CERN
View full image ↗ How was this image made?
The creative brief sent to the image model. These are instructions, not a record of what actually happened.
Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The first website lived on the same NeXT computer used to write the first browser and server — with a red handwritten label: 'This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!'
End of 1990: the Web works
By the end of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had the first Web server and browser running together at CERN — a functional client-server system in which a browser could request and display linked documents over HTTP. CERN's own account says it was running by Christmas; the earliest known HTML document is dated 3 December 1990.
No exact completion day is securely established. The widely repeated 20 December date is not confirmed by the strongest sources — Berners-Lee's own FAQ says only 'end of 1990' — so the milestone is honestly dated to the month, not a day.
The project page on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer
Everything ran on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer in his CERN office. The first HTTP-served page lived at nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html — the famous info.cern.ch address was a later alias, not the machine's original hostname.
The page was the Web explaining itself: it described the WorldWideWeb project and linked to information about hypertext, technical instructions for setting up a Web server, and other servers as they appeared.
A browser that could write
The first browser was also an editor — users could edit pages inside it, a feature usually dropped from simplified accounts. The system grew from Berners-Lee's March 1989 proposal, formalized with Robert Cailliau in November 1990.
Two honest caveats close the story: no untouched 1990 copy of the first page survives online — the familiar reconstruction derives from later material — and access initially remained extremely limited, circulating within CERN through 1991 until the public announcement that August.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 3 audit passes Date disputed
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1990-12.
What the sources leave uncertain
- Primary and institutional sources support “end of 1990,” “December 1990” or “by Christmas,” but do not securely establish one exact completion day.
- 20 December 1990 is widely repeated as the first-site date, but Berners-Lee’s own FAQ gives only “end of 1990,” while CERN says the system was running by Christmas. The exact day should therefore not be asserted as settled.
- “Completes the test for the first webpage” is not standard terminology in the strongest sources. The milestone was the operation/demonstration of a browser, HTTP server and first HTTP-served project page.
- No untouched 1990 copy of the first page survives online; the familiar reconstruction derives from later material.