The first website ever brought back to life with its original URL

April 30th may seem as ordinary as any other date, but in 1993 it marked an important milestone in the development of global communications: it was on that day that the World Wide Web entered the public domain. CERN, the same research group that's presently busy smashing protons together using the Large Hadron Collider, made World Wide Web technologies available to everyone on a royalty-free basis. Without that enlightened decision, backed by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, we might never have enjoyed the glories of GIFs, ubiquitous social networking, and instant music streaming.

In a celebration of the web's proud history, the CERN team has started up a new project to revive the very first website at its original URL. A 1992 copy of the spartan web page — describing what the web was and how it could be used — had already been available on the W3C servers, but now it's back at its original location. Alongside the website restoration, CERN aims to dig up and preserve all digital assets associated with the inception of the web, with the ultimate goal being to turn info.CERN.ch into a historical archive for future generations.