The OG URL

I’m currently reading This Is For Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. I love biographies about computer history, and Tim’s story is an important one.

I’ve just read the part where he talks about creating the first web page so I thought I’d double check the first URL (or UDI as he originally named them) to see if it was still available, which it is.

https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

It shouldn’t come as a surprise really, but we’ve become so accustomed to dead links that I half expected the request to be redirected elsewhere. Turns out it did disappear for a while, but a project in 2013 resurrected it. Thanks goodness for that!

Part of me wants to believe it’s still being served from a NeXT workstation under a desk in CERN, but the original computer is now at the Science Museum in London. 

Vive le Web.