Cern, the giant European laboratory for high-energy physics based near Geneva, has put a prehistoric website online again. Or to be more precise, parts of that website are online, because over the years a lot of the original content has been lost.

The site that Cern is trying to restore is the first web page in the history of the internet. The site, which appeared “online” within Cern’s internal network on 30 April, 1993 and can be considered the birth certificate of the worldwide web, brought together research from different groups of scientists working at the physics lab. It was created at the beginning of the 1990s, by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee and Flemish informatics engineer Robert Cailliau.

Contrary to popular use, the “web” and the “internet” are actually two different things. The internet links computers to other computers around the world and is a way of transporting content. The world wide web is software that lets you use that content, or contribute your own. The web runs on the HTTP protocol, which enables you to use browsers and hyperlinks. The internet is much older than the web and was developed by the US army in late 1960s, under the name Arpanet.

Data loss

Due to the tremendous pace at which the web and the internet have evolved over the past 20 years, the first website has now become a real museum piece. But unlike traditional museum pieces, like paintings and sculptures, bits and bytes are extremely volatile. It’s a daring exploit to bring together all the data that constituted that first webpage.

“Putting the original website online again, with the same content as in 1993, is a very difficult task,” says Cailliau, who was born and raised in Tongeren. “A lot of the data has been lost because at that time, people weren’t aware of the historical meaning of our invention.”

Now Cern has sent out a message for help to people outside the research community. “Maybe someone out there still has parts of the original data on his home computer,” says Cailliau, who is retired now but still lives near Cern, just across the border in France.

The worldwide web has evolved to a highly interactive and userfriendly digital environment. Are you a fan of the web 2.0?
Robert Cailliau: “Actually, I’m not. The trend now is that information is spread less by means of text and more by visuals, like pictures and videos. I find that a regrettable evolution because videos consume much more time. An online article that is properly structured makes it possible for me to quickly scan it – after which I can decide whether I want to read the entire article. That’s not possible with video: You can’t work out if it’s worth viewing it entirely. And a video that lasts 10 minutes can often be summarised in a few lines, which takes only one minute to read. Furthermore, you can’t search inside videos with search engines. These are real shortcomings.”

Do you use social media?
“A pure waste of time! I don’t like to be on websites in which the biggest goal is to keep you there – taking away your browsing freedom entirely. I never visit Facebook, and I never twitter (laughs). You might call me a bit old-fashioned.

“But much more worrying is the fact that more and more websites oblige you to have and maintain a social media account. Recently, I wanted to post a message on the website of a TV station. I failed, because there was no other way than to post this message to the Facebook wall of the TV station. This is a strategy to either keep us silent or to make us take part in the madness of the online crowd.”

But hasn’t the web made our electronic devices more user-friendly?
“I must say that I’m not fond of mobile phones, or smartphones either. Today you have access to thousands of apps, but only a few of these are really useful. Besides that, it annoys me that smartphones hide the way they function. They look very nice, but who knows that the GPS receiver inside your smartphone doesn’t rely on a mobile network or wi-fi – but on signals from satellites? Companies like Apple are real masters at hiding this functioning. And this is making us dumber. The only thing that the producers of smartphones want is that we do data roaming all the time. This is one of the most lucrative services in the telecom sector.”

Would you compare the invention of the web with the invention of printing, or even with the discovery of fire?
“When you realise how information and knowledge was gathered and stored before, say in the 1950s, then the internet and the web are at least part of a big revolution: the so-called information revolution. Before the age of the computer, every piece of information was stored in a physical form, for example in books in a library. Finding the right information was a slow and often difficult process.

“The information revolution, by which I mean the transition from physically to digitally stored information, is comparable to the transition of hunting and fishing in prehistoric times to early farming. Before that transition, every day in human life was dominated by the search for food. From the beginning of agriculture, people got a grip on their future. Suddenly, people were able to make plans and to look further ahead than the next day. That caused a dramatic shift in the … attitude towards their lives. I see the same happening now due to the information revolution. People get even more control of their lives and futures because they can now access all the information that’s available.

“However, the challenge for every one of us is to find the right information and to deal with the overflow of data the world wide web pours out onto us every single day.”

The world’s first website, which is in the midst of restoration, can be found at www.tinyurl.com/cailliau