Historic web page recovered through online plea

A hunt that seeks to find the first web page from the earliest days of web world online has been triumphant unearthing an artefact from 1991.

Zee Media Bureau

London: A hunt that seeks to find the first web page from the earliest days of web world online has been triumphant unearthing an artefact from 1991.
This page belonged to 1991 and was discovered after CERN launched a public appeal for files, hardware and software from the web’s earliest days.

Web creators Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau initiated a public appeal to recover artefacts and documents from those earliest days of web world in late April.

According to the BBC, the online appeal has led to the recovery of the page. But, the original page has been found missing because web creators did not preserve the early work.

Also, other potential finds from that old computer of the same era remain unknown as the password for it has been forgotten.

The files and data for those first pages have been lost because of the way the men worked as they were developing the technology.

Dan Noyes, web manager at Cern’s communication group, said that when the early web developers updated it they just replaced and over-wrote the file. He also said that the developers had no idea that what they were doing would be so influential and saw no need to keep copies.

Fortunately this one page was recovered because Paul Jones, one of the people to whom Sir Tim showed his webpage and demonstrated how it would work at the Hypertext 91 conference in the US kept a copy of the page.

Mr Noyes said that Jones had one of the same types of machine, a Next computer, that Sir Tim used for the demo.

There is a possibility of getting more relics from the web’s earliest days on Mr Jones’ machine, but for the moment they remain hidden because the password for the computer’s hard drive has been forgotten.

Noyes also remarked that work was underway to recover the password and to sort the huge mass of material gathered from the public appeal, the report said.

With Agency inputs

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