Nikhef and the www
Welcome to one of the world’s first three websites!
The World Wide Web has become an integral part of our lives. The latest news, train schedules, weather forecasts… we can now check it all online and on our mobile devices. Every day, new and more convenient websites and apps are added. It’s hard to imagine life without “the web”—or perhaps it’s no longer even possible.
It’s hard to believe now, but in 1992 there were only three websites in the entire world: those of CERN, SLAC and Nikhef.
The Nikhef website went live in February 1992. The web server was initially installed on nic.nikhef.nl, the network information system maintained by Nikhef’s network gurus. Not long after, the web server was moved to a more powerful system: www.nikhef.nl.
This is what the Nikhef website looked like in 1992
The origins of the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web was developed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. At CERN, thousands of physicists from hundreds of institutions around the world conduct research into the building blocks of matter. Effective information exchange among these physicists is therefore essential. Two IT staff members at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, launched the World Wide Web project in 1989, seeking a way to facilitate the exchange of information among the various institutions affiliated with CERN. They developed the web standards HTTP and HTML.
- 1989: Tim Berners-Lee writes the proposal for what will later be called the WWW, his boss Mike Sendall wrote: “vague but exciting“.
- 1991: The WWW is presented, including at a workshop attended by Nikhef employee Willem van Leeuwen. That same year, the first web server, info.cern.ch, went live, and the software was made available through the CERN Program Library.
- 1992: The Nikhef website goes live
- 1993: CERN states that the software is available on a royalty-free basis.
On April 30, 2013, the world’s first website—CERN’s—was brought back online.
Nikhef’s role
Willem van Leeuwen, a former researcher at Nikhef, remembers everything about the early days of the WWW. “The WWW runs on the Internet. It wasn’t until it was set up and I saw it that I understood how it worked.”
As one of the research institutes affiliated with CERN, Nikhef played an important role in promoting this new technology within CERN and among the other institutes conducting research at CERN. Because Nikhef had a good network connection with CERN, Nikhef’s WWW server was always available for demonstrations. As webmaster, Willem van Leeuwen had developed a number of simple scripts to make Nikhef information accessible. Tim Berners-Lee used these to convince sceptical CERN staff of the Web’s capabilities. As a result, Nikhef.nl ultimately became one of the first three websites in the world—and the first in the Netherlands!