Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

The first websites: how the web spread around the world

Title card reading 'The first websites' in black, blue and purple under a mock browser address bar showing http://info.cern.ch/, beside a world map with countries coloured from dark blue (1990) to pale gold (2000) by the year of their earliest recorded website, the United States and western Europe darkest, much of Africa grey. Text: from one server at CERN to 83 countries; 70% of the early sites in Wikipedia's list with a known country were American.

On 20 December 1990 a computer at CERN began serving the world’s first website. I mapped how the web spread from there, using Wikipedia’s list of 119 websites founded before 1995, the founding dates of 2,208 more in Wikidata, and the dates of every country’s internet domain.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper

The address was info.cern.ch, and the pages described the World Wide Web project itself. Tim Berners-Lee had written the first web server and the first browser at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, and in January 1991 the first servers outside CERN were switched on. That December, after a visit to CERN, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California launched the first web server outside Europe. By the end of 1993 there were 623 websites in the world. By June 1995 there were some 23,500.

Nobody kept a complete record of those early sites. But Wikipedia keeps a list of the notable ones founded before 1995, and Wikidata records founding dates for thousands more. Neither is a census, and both have quirks I will come to. Put together, though, they show the shape of the web’s first decade.

World map with countries coloured by the year of the earliest website recorded for them, from dark blue in 1990 to pale gold in 2000. Switzerland, the United States, the Netherlands, Ireland, Israel, Japan and France are in the deepest blues, followed by much of western Europe, Canada, Russia, Argentina and Australia in purple in 1993; Brazil, China and South Africa follow in 1995, then countries across South America, the Middle East, West Africa and Southeast Asia later in the decade. Much of Africa stays grey. Dots mark the early websites in Wikipedia's list, clustered in the United States and western Europe
The earliest website recorded for each country, 1990 to 2000, in Wikipedia’s pre-1995 list and (from 1993) Wikidata. Outlined: countries in the list. Dots: listed websites.

First the physicists

Wikipedia’s “List of websites founded before 1995” turns out not to be a table but a set of short paragraphs, one per website, under a heading for each year. I split it into entries and coded each one: where it was, what kind of site it was, and whether the text says it still exists. It holds 119 websites: 3 from 1991, 14 from 1992, 28 from 1993 and 74 from 1994.

The first two years belong to science. Of the 17 sites from 1991 and 1992, 12 were laboratories, universities or libraries: CERN and SLAC, Fermilab in Illinois, Nikhef in Amsterdam (the third website in the world, by the list’s count), University College Cork (the first in Ireland), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (the first website written right to left) and KEK, which put up the first web page in Japan in September 1992.

Stacked bar chart of the websites in Wikipedia's pre-1995 list by year and kind: 3 in 1991, 14 in 1992, 28 in 1993 and 74 in 1994. The 1991 and 1992 bars are mostly blue, for science, universities and libraries; the 1994 bar is dominated by grey fan and hobby sites, red companies, gold news sites, teal government sites, purple search engines and pink culture sites, with only a sliver of blue
Websites in Wikipedia’s pre-1995 list, by year and kind (my coding).

Then everybody else

In April 1993 CERN put the web’s code in the public domain, and the graphical Mosaic browser made it easy to use. By 1994 only 3 of the 74 listed sites belonged to laboratories or universities. The rest were Apple, IBM and Microsoft; the BBC, The Economist and The Irish Times; the White House and HM Treasury; Lycos, WebCrawler and Yahoo!; and, the biggest group in the whole list, sites for fans, hobbies and fun. There was the first webcam (the Trojan Room coffee pot, connected to the web in November 1993), the Internet Movie Database (first hosted at Cardiff University), the Simpsons Archive, and a page that let you attack a drawing of Barney the Dinosaur.

How many survive? The list’s own text says 43 are still online, sometimes at a new address, and 14 have closed or been absorbed. For the other 62 it does not say, so both numbers are floors. The survivors include arXiv, which began at Los Alamos in April 1993, and FogCam in San Francisco, which the list calls the oldest webcam still running.

Horizontal bar chart of the pre-1995 list by kind and status. Fans, hobbies and fun is longest at 26, with 11 still online, 5 closed and 10 not stated; companies and shops 20; news, magazines and broadcasters 16, with 8 still online; science and research 15; culture, causes and faith 14; government and politics 10, none closed; search engines and directories 10, with 3 closed; universities and libraries 8
What the list’s text says about each website today, by kind.

An American web?

The web was invented in Switzerland, but in the list it is overwhelmingly American. Of the 106 websites I could place, 74 (70%) were in the United States, 25 in Europe and only 7 anywhere else: Canada, Japan, Israel and a site about the Zapatista uprising in Mexico. The United Kingdom had 11 and Ireland 4.

Bar chart of the pre-1995 list by country: United States 74, United Kingdom 11, Ireland 4, Switzerland 3, Canada 3, France 2, Japan 2, and one each for the Netherlands, Israel, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic and Mexico, with 13 not known
Wikipedia’s pre-1995 list by country.

Wikidata tells a different story. Of its 1,298 websites founded from 1990 to 2000 with a known country, only 28% are American and 48% European, with Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany and France next after the United States. Each source has its bias. The list is written in English, largely from memory, and remembers the American web. Wikidata is built by editors everywhere and records far more local newspapers and companies, but 910 of its 2,208 websites have no country at all, and the many American sites on .com are probably among them. The truth is somewhere in between, and the data cannot say exactly where.

Line chart of the share of each year's websites by region from 1990 to 2000 in Wikidata: Europe between about 33% and 58%, the United States between about 13% and 46%, the rest of the world between about 15% and 41%. Squares for Wikipedia's list from 1991 to 1994 show the United States at 33% in 1991 rising to 78% in 1994
The United States, Europe and the rest of the world: Wikidata (lines) and the pre-1995 list (squares).

Country by country

Wikidata’s founding dates need care. It lists 915 “websites” founded before 1990, such as the Buenos Aires Herald, founded as a newspaper in 1876: those are organisations, not web launches, and I leave them out. Even its 1990 to 1992 dates are suspect, because Wikidata has 139 websites founded in those years, more than twice as many as existed in the whole world at the end of 1992. So for the earliest website in each country I use the list, plus Wikidata only from 1993.

By that measure the web reached 7 countries by the end of 1992, 35 by the end of 1994 and 83 by 2000. That is “earliest recorded in these sources”, not the true first: most early websites left no trace, and some countries’ first record is a newspaper whose founding year has been copied onto its website. Country code domains such as .ch and .jp came first, often years earlier: 46 existed by the end of 1990 and 223 by 2000.

Line chart from 1985 to 2000. A dashed purple line for countries with their own country code domain rises from 3 in 1985 to 46 in 1990, 130 in 1994 and 223 in 2000. A solid blue line for countries with a recorded website starts at 1 in 1990, reaches 7 in 1992, 35 in 1994 and 83 in 2000
Countries with their own internet domain, and countries with a recorded website, 1985 to 2000.
Stacked bar chart of Wikidata websites founded each year from 1990 to 2000, by region: about 40 to 60 a year from 1990 to 1993 (faded for 1990 to 1992, as mostly founding dates), 104 in 1994, 191 in 1995, rising to 438 in 1999 and 437 in 2000. Europe in purple is the largest coloured block in most years, with smaller blocks for the United States and the rest of the world, and a large grey block on top has no country recorded
Wikidata websites founded each year, by region. Grey: no country recorded.

How I did this

I split Wikipedia’s list into its entries and coded each by hand from its text: the place where the text names one, otherwise the well-known home of the organisation behind the site; its kind; and its status only where the text states it. From Wikidata I took every item typed as a website with a founding date up to 2000, its country (or the country of its headquarters), and the dates of country code domains. Wikidata dates before 1990 count as the founding of the organisation, not the website. The paper sets out every step and caveat, and the interactive map lets you play the decade year by year and click any site for its address and Wikipedia article.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

Tristan Hotham

,
, , , , , , ,