What year was the first website launched?

The internet began as a way for scientists to share research data, but someone had to create the first actual website. Before social media, before Amazon, before dancing hamsters and "Under Construction" GIFs, there was just one lonely page floating in cyberspace. When did this digital pioneer make its debut?

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The answer is: 1991

The first website went live in August 1991, and honestly, it was pretty meta. It was basically an instruction manual for... using websites. Tim Berners-Lee created it while working at CERN, the European physics lab where scientists smash particles together to unlock the universe's mysteries.

The site lived at http://info.cern.ch and simply explained what the World Wide Web was and how to use it. There were no flashy graphics, no cat videos, and not even a single animated GIF. Just black text on a white background with some blue hyperlinks. It looked like something from a 1980s computer terminal because, well, that's basically what it was.

Berners-Lee didn't even bother saving a screenshot of the original version. The earliest copy we have is from 1992, which CERN restored and put back online in 2013. When asked about the site's modest design, Berners-Lee said he was more focused on making the system work than making it pretty.

While Berners-Lee was busy explaining how to use the World Wide Web, he probably never imagined just how massive it would become. By 1992, there were only ten websites total. A year later, there were 130. Today? The count is somewhere north of a billion sites and growing every second.