What year was the first website launched?

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.