The Internet Turns Twenty: 350 Million Domains, 20 Billion Pages

August 6, 2011, marked the twentieth anniversary of the first website as we know it. On this day in 1991, the World Wide Web (WWW) technology was born, invented by British Sir Tim Burners-Lee.

The first website was hosted at Info.cern.ch. The site described the new World Wide Web (WWW) technology, based on the HTTP data transfer protocol, and also described the URL addressing system and the principles of using the hypertext markup language HTML.

Over time, Info.cern.ch evolved into the world's first online directory – later, a list of links to other resources was posted on its pages.

You can see what the world's first web page looked like atthis linkon the page of a special Internet museum created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Tim Berners-Lee worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva in the 1980s, when he created a hypertext system and suggested that his colleagues use it in their work. In May 1991, CERN approved the World Wide Web standard.

To develop and launch his first web applications, Tim Berners-Lee used a computer from NeXT, a company founded by current Apple CEO Steve Jobs. NeXT was later acquired by Apple.

By the end of 1991, web servers had appeared at several more European institutions, as well as at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). A year later, there were 26 web servers worldwide, and the year after that, their number had increased more than eightfold.

In 2004, Tim Berners-Lee was knighted and awarded the inaugural Millennium Technology Prize, as well as the Order of Merit.

The number of websites currently exceeds 350 million, and the number of web pages exceeds 20 billion.