JEFFREY COLLINS For the European physicists who created the World Wide Web,preserving its history is as elusive as unlocking the mysteries of how the universe began. The scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research,known by its French acronym CERN,are searching for the first Web page. It was at CERN that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1990 as an unsanctioned project,using a NeXT computer that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs designed in the late 80s during his 12-year exile from the company. Dan Noyes oversees CERNs website and has taken on the project to uncover the worlds first Web page. He says that no matter how much data they sort through,researchers may never make a clear-cut discovery of the original web page because of the nature of how data is shared. Its not like a book. A book exists through time. Data gets overwritten and looped around, Noyes said. In April,CERN restored a 1992 copy of the first-ever website that Berners-Lee created to arrange CERN-related information. It was the earliest copy CERN could find at the time,and Noyes promised then to keep looking. After National Public Radio did a story on the search,a professor at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill came forward with a 1991 version. Paul Jones met Berners-Lee during the British scientists visit to the US for a conference in 1991,just a year after Berners-Lee invented the Web. Jones said Berners-Lee shared the page with the professor,who has transferred it from server to server through the years. A version remains on the Internet today at an archive Jones runs,ibiblio. The page Jones received from Berners-Lee is locked in Joness NeXT computer,behind a password that has long been forgotten. The Web page preserved by Jones is both familiar and quaint. There are no flashy graphics or video clips. Instead,it is a page of text on a white background with 19 hyperlinks. Some of the links,such as ones about CERN,have been updated and still work. On the other hand,a link to the phone numbers for CERN staffers is dead. The Internet itself dates back to 1969,when computer scientists gathered in a lab at the University of California,Los Angeles,to exchange data between two bulky computers. In the early days,the Internet had email,message boards known as Usenet and online communities such as The WELL. Berners-Lee was looking for ways to control computers remotely at CERN. His innovation was to combine the Internet with another concept that dates to the 1960s: hypertext,which is a way of presenting information nonsequentially. Although he never got the project formally approved,his boss suggested he quietly tinker with it anyway. Berners-Lee began writing the software for the Web in October 1990,got his browser working by mid-November and made the program available at CERN by Christmas. Berners-Lees office was a few corridors down from Noyes at CERNs headquarters in Geneva. Nearby is a plaque honouring him for his innovation. Noyes recently brought his 14-year-old son and showed it to him. For him,it doesnt make any sense, Noyes said. He cant imagine the world without the Web. Thats part of why Noyes believes it is important to round up the World Wide Webs history. The quest for the first Web page reminds him of CERNs main goalseeking answers about the universe using tools such as the Large Hadron Collider. Jones understands the pull of trying to find the first Web page even if it doesnt make much sense. After all,even the simplest page created by a novice today is richer than those Web pages two decades ago. He likens it to why people go to see original paintings of The Scream or the Mona Lisa when they can see replicas. No matter how perfectly you can reproduce something,like The Scream,we have a fetish for the original, Jones said. The more you see the derivative,the more you want to see the original.
