The first website was created in August 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, a European nuclear research agency. Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb browser became publicly available the same month. By June 1992, there were ten websites. The World Wide Web began to enter everyday use in 1993, helping to grow the number of websites to 623 by the end of the year. In 1994, websites for the general public became available. By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was 2,278, including several notable websites and many precursors of today's most popular services.
By June 1995, the number of websites had expanded significantly, with some 23,500 sites. Thus, this list of websites founded before 1995 covers the early innovators. Of the 2,879 websites established before 1995, those listed here meet one or more of the following:
They still exist (albeit in some cases with different names). They made a significant contribution to the history of the World Wide Web. They helped to shape modern Web content, such as webcomics and weblogs.
For this list, the term website is interpreted as a unique hostname that can be resolved into an IP address.
1991 websites The following list of websites established in 1991 is in chronological order.
CERN CERN, a research center in Switzerland, created the first website. The Web was publicly announced with a post to the Usenet newsgroup alt.hypertext on August 6, 1991. There is a snapshot of the site from November 1992 at The World Wide Web project.
World Wide Web Virtual Library The World Wide Web Virtual Library is a website started as Tim Berners-Lee's web catalog at CERN. There is a snapshot of the site from November 1992 at Subject listing – Information by Subject.
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Paul Kunz, of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) at Stanford University, visited Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in September 1991. He was impressed by the WWW project and brought a copy of the software back to Stanford. SLAC launched the first web server in North America on December 12, 1991. SLAC's first web page was the SLACVM Information Service.
1992 websites Near the end of 1992, there were fifty to sixty websites, according to a robot web crawl by Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica researcher Guido van Rossum. The following list is in chronological order.
Nikhef Nikhef, the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics, launched the third website in the world in February 1992. It was originally at nic.nikhef.nl.
National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications created a website that was home to the NCSA Mosaic web browser, as well as documentation on the web and a "What's New?" list which many people used as an early web directory.
FNAL Fermilab, a high-energy physics laboratory in Illinois, created fnal.gov, the second or third website in the United States. It was established in June 1992.
SunSITE SunSITE (Sun Software, Information & Technology Exchange) started in 1992 as an FTP service and was hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was a comprehensive archiving project that was a collaboration between Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation and the Office of Information Technology at the University of North Carolina.
Wright State University Libraries The Wright State University University Library's first web presence, LIBNET, was launched in 1992. This is just one year after the first website was introduced to the public. The interface provided access to the library catalog, other library catalog, internet resources and subject guides, government resources, course reserve and more. It was a very early example of an academic library website.
Ohio State University The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science developed early gateway programs and undertook the mass conversion of existing documents, including the main page for RFCs, TeXinfo, UNIX, and the Usenet.
IN2P3 The French National Institute for Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (IN2P3) launched its website at Centre de Calcul in 1992.
CURIA Peter Flynn from University College Cork (UCC) saw Tim Berners-Lee demonstrating the Web at a RARE WG3 meeting. He installed Berners-Lee's client and server software on a Sun workstation for the CURIA project at UCC, now known as Corpus of Electronic Texts. The web server in was running in April 1992, becoming the ninth web server in the world and the first in Ireland.
HUJI The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) Information Service launched its website in Hebrew and English in April 1992. It was the first RTL website and the tenth website to go online.
The Exploratorium The Exploratorium in San Francisco, California, was one of the first science museums to go online.
simianpress simianpress was a manifestation of youngmonkey. It was a showcase for graphic design and publishing projects, likely offering the first professional website design. It merged with youngmonkey in 1995.
CBSS CBSS, Inc. was a network consulting firm in Houston, Texas that came online in late 1992. The Website is no longer maintained but still visible at www.cbss.com.
KEK KEK: The High Energy Accelerator Research Organization established the first web page in Japan. It was created by at the suggestion of Tim Berners-Lee in September 1992. CERN's website was linked to the KEK page on September 30, 1992. It is still online at KEK Entry Point.
Cybergrass Bob Cherr launched the Bluegrass Music News and Information, the first music-based website, on September 9, 1992. Its name changed to Banjo on September 30, 1992, and Cybergrass in 1995. Its content was bluegrass music, lyrics, and chords. It was hosted on the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center vax, parcvax.xerox.com. It now resides at www.cybergrass.com.
1993 websites By the end of 1993, there were 623 websites, according to a study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Matthew Gray. The following list of websites established in 1993 is in alphabetical order.
Bloomberg.com Bloomberg.com is a financial portal with information on markets, currency conversion, news and events, and Bloomberg Terminal subscriptions.
Chabad.org Chabad.org is the flagship website of the Chabad Hasidic Judaism movement. It was launched in fall of 1993.
Doctor Fun Doctor Fun was one of the first webcomics. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications called it "a major breakthrough for the Web".Stratton, Erik. "A Brief History of Webcomics". The Rutgers Review, Vol. 40, Issue 1, Page 15What's New: September, 1993 , Mosaic Communications Corporation. It laid the foundation for today's webcomics.
Électricité de France Électricité de France, the French utility company, had one of the first industrial websites in Europe. It started as the website of the company's research and development division (R&D) and was implemented by engineers Sylvain Langlois, Emmanuel Poiret, and Daniel Glazman. They did not have approval for the site and had to restart the server by connecting to RENATER through a 155Mb link, every time IT shut it down. Electricité de France's R&D later submitted patches to CERN httpd and was active in Web standardization.
Global Network Navigator Created by O'Reilly Media, Global Network Navigator is an example of an early web directory and is one of the Web's first commercial sites. It was hosted at Bolt Beranek and Newman and was launched in October 1993.
Haystack Observatory Haystack Observatory's website explained its radio and radar remote sensing mission and provided data access for science users. John Holt rolled out its content on December 13, 1993. The website is still active at www.haystack.mit.edu. The original web page format is archived at www.haystack.mit.edu/orig/.
IMDb The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was founded in 1990 by participants in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies. IMDb was launched on the web in late 1993 and was initially hosted by the computer science department of Cardiff University in Wales.
Internet Underground Music Archive Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was created by students at the University of California, Santa Cruz to help promote unsigned musical artists. It shared music using the MP2 format, presaging the later extreme popularity of MP3 sharing and online music stores. Alt URL
IONA Technologies The IONA Technologies website, www.iona.ie, was created by their System administrator, Justin Mason in June 1993, becoming the first website in Ireland that was run by a commercial company. Initially, the site just included pages for his own use, but with Colin Newman they put together web pages for the company and its object request broker.
Joachim Jarre Society The Joachim Jarre Society website was created by students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in November 1993. It was one of the first websites in Norway.
JumpStation JumpStation was the world's first Web search engine.Why we nearly McGoogled it Metro, March 15, 2009 It was launched by Jonathon Fletcher on December 12, 1993.Robots, Spiders and Wanderers: Finding Information on the Web archived March 28, 2009 from the originalAdam Wishart and Regula Bochsler: Leaving Reality Behind: etoys v eToys.com, and other battles to control cyberspace, Ecco, 2003, . It was hosted at the University of Stirling in Scotland and operated until 1994.Googling was born in Stirling The Scotsman, 15 March 2009
LANL preprint archive The LANL preprint archive provided web access to thousands of papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, and biology. It was developed by Paul Ginsparg out of earlier Gopher, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and e-mail archives at the Los Alamos National Laboratory It was launched in April 1993 and moved to Cornell University as ArXiv when Ginsparg took a position there in 2001. It is still active as arxiv.org.
LSD.com LSD.com, the "digital acid test" came online on November 18, 1993.
The OTIS Project After a start as an anonymous FTP-based art gallery and collaborative collective, The OTIS Project (later SITO) moved to the web in January 1993. This artist collaborative was hosted by SunSITE. It remains at sito.org/.
The Tech The Tech, the campus newspaper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the first newspaper to deliver content over the Web, beginning in May 1993.
NASA NASA.gov is the website of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was launched in 1993.
Nexor Martijn Koster created a website for Nexor, an early Internet software company.
MTV MTV VJ Adam Curry registered the music television network's domain in 1993 and personally ran an unofficial site. Later, MTV sued Curry over the rights to the domain. The corporate website is still live at www.mtv.com/.
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Nippon Telegraph and Telephone or NTT ( was the most famous web page in Japan in the mid-1990s. The page launched in December 1993. It still has a website at group.ntt/en.
PARC Map Server PARC Map Server is the earliest precursor of MapQuest and Google Maps.
PARC Researcher PARC Researcher was created by PARC researcher, Steve Putz, who tied an existing map viewing program to the Web. It is now defunct.
photo.net Philip Greenspun designed and founded photo.net, an online photography resource and community. Later, Greenspun released the software behind photo.net, the ArsDigita Community System, as a free open-source toolkit for building community websites.
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