For the European physicists who created the World Wide Web, preserving its history is as elusive as unlocking the mysteries of how the universe began.
The scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN, are searching for the first Web page. It was there that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1990 as an unsanctioned project.
Dan Noyes oversees CERN’s website and has taken on the project to uncover the world’s first Web page. He says it may be impossible to uncover a clear-cut “first.” That’s because of the way data is shared, overwritten and looped around.
Among the earliest existing versions of the first Web page is one maintained by a professor the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
FILED UNDER: Mysteries of cyberspace
