The Nikhef website in 1992

The Nikhef website displayed by the linemode browser
With this browser one had to type a number to select a page

The Nikhef website became operational in February 1992. The webserver was installed on nic.nikhef.nl, the network information system of the network gurus at Nikhef. Later the webserver was moved to a more powerful system with the alias www.nikhef.nl.

Read my e-mail about our webserver to Tim Berners Lee and his answer.

During 1992 and 1993 more services were added, see the "screenshots".

Some documentation:

To demonstrate the flexibility of the webserver we installed the World Wide sqrt solver.
This version uses php but the original version was based on the isindex functionality of the server.

During WWW9 a special recognition award was presented to NIKHEF.

About this page

Twenty years ago CERN published a statement that made the World Wide Web technology available on a royalty-free basis. To mark the anniversary of the publication of this document, CERN is starting a project to restore the first website and to preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web.

Click here to browse the first website.

Many links to outside servers have become invalid. We made the link to the first Nikhef site operational again. It points to this page which contains some information about our first experiences with the web.