Re-creation of the world's first webpage to celebrate 20 years of Web

GENEVA, Switzerland, April 30 (UPI) -- A team at the European Organization for Nuclear Research says it has launched a project to re-create the world's first webpage.

To coincide with the 20th anniversary of the research center's developing of the Web and giving it to the world -- Britain's Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed it while working at CERN -- the team will work with the original hardware and software involved.

Berners-Lee and his colleagues on the Web project argued that CERN should not claim ownership of the fledgling technology, and the CERN management agreed and made the Web publicly available with no one group or institution claiming ownership.

A re-creation of the world's first website will enable future generations to understand how the Web is changing modern life, CERN scientists said.

"I want my children to be able to understand the significance of this point in time: The Web is already so ubiquitous -- so, well, normal -- that one risks failing to see how fundamentally it has changed," Dan Noyes, Web manager for CERN's communication group, told BBC News.

"We are in a unique moment where we can still switch on the first Web server and experience it," he said. "We want to document and preserve that."