Web Surf Like It’s 1989: You Can Now Try the Original World Wide Web Browser

CERN engineers recreated the first online interface to mark the 30th anniversary of the web.

A snapshot of the original World Wide Web browser from 30 years ago. (Photo: screenshot, CERN)
A snapshot of the original World Wide Web browser from 30 years ago. (Photo: screenshot, CERN)

To mark the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, the engineers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research decided to have a little fun and help everyone travel back in time online. To do so, they recreated the original web interface, developed by Tim Berners Lee so now you can experience first-hand what it was like to surf the web in 1989.

The original browser is almost quaint in its old school simplicity. And while you can put in modern urls to test out, only the title frame of the web page will appear. But clicking around the navigation bars, user guides, and file access pages is still a kind of interesting, if dorky, step back in history.

If you quickly tire of the old browser’s lack of functionality, you can click on a modern web mini-site from CERN on how their team of developers brought the old WWW browser back to life, which may prove far more interesting.

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