1990
CERN httpd, the day the world's first website went live
"A document on your computer is on my screen! This feels like magic, doesn't it?" One small program Tim Berners-Lee wrote in a Swiss research lab became the ancestor of Naver, Google, and Facebook.
In 1990, "the web" as we know it didn't exist yet. The internet was there, but it was for sending email between universities and shipping files around with FTP. The very idea that you could "view" a document sitting on someone else's computer wasn't a thing. To share information, you mailed a file, FTP'd it down, or — surreal as it sounds today — printed it and put it in an envelope.
A researcher at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee had a strange idea. "What if my computer just stayed running, and any time someone said 'show me that page,' a small program on it sent the contents back? Then anyone in the world could see my notes, instantly."
He wrote that small program himself and called it CERN httpd. It was the world's first web server. The mechanic was simple: somebody typed a http://... address into a browser, CERN httpd received the request, found the matching HTML file on disk, and sent it back. The first colleague to fetch a page from another machine actually exclaimed: "I just clicked a link and a document on your computer is on my screen. This feels like magic!"
That tiny program is the ancestor of every website on Earth. The colossal sites of today — Google, Facebook, Amazon — are doing exactly what CERN httpd did, just at billions of times the scale: receive a request, return the right page. A small program one researcher wrote in his lab quietly seeded the way humanity would share information thirty years later.
CERN httpd primarily served static files but also listed directories and triggered simple scripts, paving the way for CGI. The pattern of accepting a request, interpreting it, and returning a response was set, allowing later WAS platforms to plug in business logic while reusing the same flow.
