The Original World Wide Web

In the category of "neat things you stumble upon" I recently came across this web page -- the ORIGINAL, first web page ever made publicly available on the World Wide Web. For those who don't know the story, it's a fascinating one.  The scientists at CERN (the Swiss lab) wrote the original code for web pages.   The purpose was to use the system to share data and information with other scientists.  But in 1993 (we are in the 20th anniversary year) they decided to give away the code for free.  They might have made money off of it, but instead they decided that opening up the code to world-wide use would have greater long-term value.  If you click on the link above you'll see how primitive the early web-pages were.  On the other hand, you'll see the seeds of what the Web has become.  As the CERN scientists put it: "The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents."  I think we can all agree that the promise of wide scale access to information and data is still a work in progress -- but I doubt the CERN scientists envisioned how large it would have grown in just 20 years. HT to Yo Yoshida at Appallicious for the pointer to this neat bit of history.