A History-Changing Moment

the computer on which the first website was published CERN

On April 30, 1993, the Switzerland-based international physics organization CERN announced that it was sharing the worldwide web with the world. To mark the occasion, it is restoring the first-ever web URL, created by the web's developer, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who was also the one who came up with the idea of giving it to the rest of us for free.
   CERN's head of communications, James Gillies, was a researcher there at the time. He looks back on the importance of the legal document that made the web publicly available. "Without it," he says, "you would have had web-like things, but they would have belonged to Microsoft or Apple or Vodafone or whoever else. You would not have a single open standard for everyone."
   As for the first website, Gillies says, "You might have thought that the first browser would be very primitive but it was not. It had graphical capabilities. You could edit into it straightaway. It was an amazing thing. It was a very sophisticated thing": http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22249490