The World Wide Web (WWW) has revolutionized the way we communicate, shop, and access information. But who were the pioneers that developed the first website? At CERN, a Swiss research center, British physicist and Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee created the world's first web browser, called WorldWideWeb. This browser was also a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for editing web pages. It was initially designed to work with the NextStep operating system.
Later, the browser was renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the World Wide Web itself. In the United States, particle physicist and software developer Paul Kunz launched the first web server at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Kunz was directly inspired by Berners-Lee's project, having met him in person at CERN in September of that same year. Berners-Lee asked Silvano de Gennaro, an Italian computer scientist working in CERN's research laboratories, to scan and upload a photo of a parody pop group called Les Horribles Cernettes (The Horrible CERN Girls) to the website info.cern.ch.
This photo became one of the first images published on the World Wide Web. In May 1994, Dutch software engineer Martijn Koster announced Aliweb's first search engine (Archie-Like Indexing in the Web), designed specifically for WWW services. Koster presented Aliweb to the public at the first international conference on WWW at CERN Research Center in Geneva. Unlike modern search engines, Aliweb didn't have a web crawler to search and index web pages.
Instead, sites were added to its database at users' request using special files containing their exact description and location.
