The internet is seen as a repository for all the world’s information. Any answer is just a good search query away. But there is one thing nobody can find: the very first webpage.
Researchers at CERN, the physics laboratory where the worldwide web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, are trying to save the earliest versions of the web.
After weeks of looking, they now say that the original webpage created in 1990 is missing. But they think it could remain on a computer disk, in the possession of an unknown technology enthusiast unaware they have a piece of history gathering dust on a bookshelf. The original page is thought to contain nothing more than text and a few links.
Dan Noyes, web manager at CERN, said: “I work just down the corridor from where [Sir Tim Berners-Lee] used to work. His old web server is in a glass case. I often walk past it. The project started when we decided to preserve that machine.
“We turned it on and it still works. We thought that might not be the case in 20 years’ time, so we should take steps to preserve it. Then I started to think about what data is on the machine. And we realised, it should have the first website.”
However, the team could not locate the founding webpage on Sir Tim’s machine or within CERN’s archives. This is partly because the British computer scientist did not think to make copies of his creation at the time.
Instead, he saved any new work over the top of that webpage, much in the same way people now save updated versions of a text document to avoid losing their work. As a result, the original site could be lost for ever.
Sir Tim told CERN’s researchers that the earliest version of a webpage he made was in 1992, two years after he created the first one. But Mr Noyes said that the original page may still be out there. In the early days, Sir Tim was travelling across the world to show computer scientists his invention, hoping to convince them to join his project. To do this, the inventor carried the physical machine containing his work along with him.
“They went to California in 1990 with the machine,” said Mr Noyes. “But the hard drive, which was a separate unit that you could unplug, was left behind. They never found it. That hard drive has the worldwide web as it existed in 1990.”
He added: “It is an optical hard drive. It looked very funky at the time, a CD-like thing that looked very futuristic.
“I can imagine that a person looked at it and thought, ‘I’ll put this on my bookshelf, I’m not sure what it is’. It’s like finding the original Gutenberg Bible on your bookshelf but not knowing what it is.”
Mr Noyes has asked all those who met Sir Tim in those early days to come forward if they have versions of the web. Last week a professor from the University of North Carolina handed over a version of a webpage from 1991, saved when he met Sir Tim during a technology conference in the United States. It is the earliest known webpage that exists, but not quite the first.
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