On 6 August 1991 Tim Berners-Lee cranked up the first ever web server in the universe. Here it is, as it was in 1992 (except that the hyperlinks on the actual page were blue):

World Wide Web

The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists , Policy , November's W3 news , Frequently Asked Questions .

What's out there?
Pointers to the world's online information, subjects , W3 servers, etc.

Help
on the browser you are using

Software Products
A list of W3 project components and their current state. (e.g. Line Mode ,X11 Viola , NeXTStep , Servers , Tools , Mail robot , Library )

Technical
Details of protocols, formats, program internals etc

Bibliography
Paper documentation on W3 and references.

People
A list of some people involved in the project.

History
A summary of the history of the project.

How can I help ?
If you would like to support the web..

Getting code
Getting the code by anonymous FTP , etc.

As of this month Google is estimated to have indexed more than 40 billion web pages, but nobody knows how many there are in total. A huge additional number are inaccessible to web search spiders.

Berners-Lee's original objective was to catalogue the corporate scientific information at CERN, where he worked at the time, so as to minimise erosion from turnover of researchers. He did not envisage convergence a decade or two later of the web, the telephone and the global positioning system to produce the iPhone, but a key measure that he took was to ensure that all associated intellectual was in the public domain.