This is the world's first (oldest) webpage. It's at CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee created the WWW protocols and httpsd web server in 1990-91. That makes the below a 22-year-old website. Interesting.
I think it's cool they still have it up and available – I'm not sure to what extent it retains its original form, but based on appearances it matches closely with my recollection of what the internet (er… "world wide web") looked like in the very early years.
I'm pretty sure my first experience with WWW was at the University of Minnesota libraries, which were already running the locally developed gopher protocols (which was an early alternate version of www, basically) for their online library catalog in 1993, and they were experimenting with https in the same vein. I distinctly recall seeing "websites" that looked exactly like the above – all white with black text and blue links, zero or quite minimal graphics.
I wrote and published my first website in 1995, in raw html using a text editor, as a first-year graduate student at University of Pennsylvania – I used the now defunct geocities hosting site. I was publishing syllabi and supplementary materials for my Spanish classes that I taught there at that time. I called it "macondonet" after García Márquez's fictional town, Macondo.
I wish I still had the code for those early pages – it would be fun to keep them live somewhere as a sort of nostalgia trip. I was lucky in that I was attending early-adopting institutions at the time the internet was first emerging, and thus I got to be an early adopter, too. I think it's ironic that all these years later, as a teacher, I'm "lower tech" than I was at that time.
