Image:FirstWebServer.jpg

Summary

This NeXT workstation (a NeXTcube) was used by Tim Berners-Lee as the first Web server on the World Wide Web. Today, it is kept in Microcosm, the public museum at the Meyrin site of CERN, in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland.

The document resting on the keyboard is a copy of "Information Management: A Proposal," which was Berners-Lee's original proposal for the World Wide Web.

The label on the cube itself has the following text: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"

Just below the keyboard (not shown) is a label which reads: "At the end of the 80s, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web using this Next computer as the first Web server."

The book is probably "Enquire Within upon Everything", which TBL describes on page one of his book Weaving the Web as "a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents' house outside London".

Photographed on August 10, 2005, by en:user:Coolcaesar and uploaded to the English Wikipedia.

Uploaded by Coolcaesar directly to Commons on June 17, 2006 after he discovered that the copy on Commons had been badly damaged by a novice who had attempted to edit out the image glare (and created a smudged mess instead).

Original file history

• 22:06, 14 August 2005 . . Coolcaesar ( Talk) . . 1000x750 (281253 bytes) (This NeXT workstation (a NeXTcube) was used by Tim Berners-Lee as the first Web server on the World Wide Web. Today, it is kept in Microcosm, the public museum at the Meyrin site of CERN, in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland.)

Licensing

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. Subject to disclaimers.