The World Wide Web turns 20 today and CERN, the organization that made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty-free basis, is celebrating the event by recreating the first Web page.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, released a statement on April 30, 1993 that made World Wide Web technology available for all.

Other information retrieval systems that used the Internet – such as WAIS and Gopher – were available at the time, but the Web’s simplicity and ease of use and the fact that the technology, with a basic browser and a library of code available, was free, led to its rapid adoption and development.

CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said in a statement, "There is no sector of society that has not been transformed by the invention, in a physics laboratory, of the Web. From research to business and education, the Web has been reshaping the way we communicate, work, innovate and live. The Web is a powerful example of the way that basic research benefits humankind."

The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated, appropriately, to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on the NeXT computer of Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist at CERN widely recognized as the inventor of the Web.

According to CERN, the website described the basic features of the web, including how to access other people’s documents and how to set up your own server, reports MSN news. The NeXT machine – the original web server – is still at CERN, however, the very first website ever published on the Web is no longer accessible at its original address.

The website contains only text explaining some of the basics of the World Wide Web and CERN is working to restore it and preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the Web.

The website was originally accessible at https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html but for many years the URL has been redirected to https://info.cern.ch

CERN retrieved a copy of the website in 1992 – the earliest it could find – and placed it back online at its original address.

In a blog post, CERN wrote, "When the first website was born, it was probably quite lonely. And with few people having access to browsers — or to Web servers so that they could in turn publish their own content — it must have taken a visionary leap of faith at the time to see why it was so exciting."

Dan Noyes, the Web manager for CERN”s communication group, said that re-creating the first website will give future generations the opportunity to think how the Web has transformed and continually changing life for many. Noyes told the BBC News, "I want my children to be able to understand the significance of this point in time: The Web is already so ubiquitous — so, well, normal — that one risks failing to see how fundamentally it has changed.”

He added, "We are in a unique moment where we can still switch on the first Web server and experience it. We want to document and preserve that."