On 20 December 1990 a computer at CERN, in Switzerland, began serving the world's first website. Ten years later 83 countries had at least one website on record. This is how the web spread: from physics laboratories to fan pages, and from Switzerland and California to every inhabited continent.
The World Wide Web began as a tool for physicists. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web server and browser at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, using a NeXT computer, and published the first website, info.cern.ch, on 20 December 1990. Within a year a laboratory in California, SLAC, had a server of its own, the first outside Europe. By the end of 1993 there were 623 websites; by the middle of 1995, some 23,500.
Which came first, and where? Wikipedia keeps a list of 119 notable websites founded before 1995, and Wikidata, the free database behind Wikipedia, records the founding dates of thousands more. Neither is a census of the early web: the list picks out about 4% of the sites that existed before 1995, and Wikidata's dates are patchy. But together they show the shape of the web's first decade. Press play on the map to watch it spread.
Countries: coloured by the year of the earliest website recorded for them in these sources, up to the year on the slider; a dark outline marks the 12 countries that appear in Wikipedia's pre-1995 list, the rest come from Wikidata founding dates, which may be the founding of the organisation behind a site rather than of the site. Faded: 5 countries whose Wikidata date comes before the country even had its own internet domain. Large dots: the 91 websites in the pre-1995 list with a known place, coloured by kind. Small dots: Wikidata websites from 1993 on with a headquarters location. Natural Earth outlines. Click anything.
For its first two years the web belonged to laboratories. CERN's first site described the project itself, and Berners-Lee's catalogue of other sites there grew into the World Wide Web Virtual Library. In January 1991 the first web servers outside CERN were switched on, and in August Berners-Lee announced the project to the world in a Usenet post. Paul Kunz of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited CERN that September, took the software home, and on 12 December 1991 SLAC launched the first web server outside Europe.
Of the 17 sites the list dates to 1991 and 1992, 12 belonged to laboratories, universities and libraries: CERN, SLAC, Fermilab and the supercomputing centre whose site became home to the Mosaic browser in the United States; Nikhef in the Netherlands; the IN2P3 institute in France; KEK in Japan. The rest were early experiments, such as a bluegrass music page hosted on a computer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, which the list counts as the first music website.
How many websites were there?
Counts of all the world's websites quoted in the introduction and year notes of Wikipedia's pre-1995 list, on a log scale. The article gives two different figures for the end of 1994. Hover a point.
Everything changed in 1993. CERN released the web's code into the public domain in April, the graphical Mosaic browser made it easy to use, and the number of sites went from about fifty to more than six hundred in a year. The list reflects it: 3 sites in 1991, 14 in 1992, 28 in 1993 and 74 in 1994. And the kind of site changed with the numbers. In 1994 only 3 of the 74 listed sites belonged to laboratories or universities. The new web was companies (Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Pizza Hut's PizzaNet), newspapers and broadcasters (the BBC, The Economist, The Daily Telegraph, The Irish Times, Radio Prague), governments (the White House, HM Treasury, Birmingham City Council, the European Commission's CORDIS), search engines (Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo!) and 20 sites for fans, hobbies and fun, the biggest group in the whole list: webcams, webcomics, the Simpsons Archive and a page that let you attack Barney the Dinosaur.
The pre-1995 list, by year and kind of website
The 119 websites in Wikipedia's list, by the year section they sit in and by my reading of what each one was. Hover a block.
Some of those firsts are household names: the Internet Movie Database went onto the web in late 1993, hosted at first by Cardiff University's computer science department; MIT's student newspaper The Tech was, by the list's account, the first newspaper on the web, in May 1993; the Trojan Room coffee pot, connected to the web in November 1993, was the first webcam; and JumpStation, hosted at the University of Stirling, was the first web search engine, in December 1993.
What happened to them
Each listed website by kind, and whether the list's own text says it is still online (at the same or a new address), says it closed, or does not say. Hover a bar.
Do they still exist? The list's text says that 43 of the 119 (36%) are still online, sometimes at a new address, and that 14 have closed or been absorbed. For the other 62 it does not say, and I have not checked them myself, so these numbers are a floor for both. The survivors include arXiv, the physics preprint server that began at Los Alamos in April 1993, ExPASy, the first life sciences website, KEK's first page, and FogCam, a webcam at San Francisco State University that the list calls the oldest still operating.
The web was invented in Europe, but it took off in the United States. Of the 106 listed websites whose country I could place, 74 (70%) were American, 25 (24%) European and just 7 elsewhere: Canada, Israel, Japan and Mexico, the last a site about the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. The United Kingdom had 11 and Ireland, punching well above its weight, 4. For 13 entries the text gives no clue to where they were made.
The pre-1995 list, by country
Country of each listed website: named in the list's text where it says, otherwise the well-known home of the organisation behind it (my assignment). Click a bar to see the country on the map.
70% of the early websites in Wikipedia's list whose country is known were American. The web's inventors were in Switzerland.
That figure says as much about the list as about the web. It is an English-language list, written mostly by people who remember the American web, and it leans that way. Wikidata, built by editors all over the world, gives a different picture. Of the 1,298 Wikidata websites founded from 1990 to 2000 with a country, only 28% are American and 48% European, with Russia (94), the United Kingdom (87), Germany (79) and France (56) next after the United States (370). Neither source is a census. But the list shows what English speakers remember; Wikidata shows how much the rest of the world built that is easy to forget.
When did each country get its first website? No source can say for certain: most early sites left no trace. What these sources can give is the earliest website recorded for each country. By that measure the web reached 7 countries by the end of 1992, all of them through the list: Switzerland, the United States, the Netherlands, Ireland, Israel, Japan and France. 35 had a recorded website by the end of 1994 and 83 by 2000, countries home to 76% of the world's people today. The other 155 countries and territories on the map have no website recorded in these sources by 2000, which does not mean they had none.
Countries reached, year by year
Countries with a recorded website (the earliest in the list or in Wikidata from 1993), and countries with their own country code internet domain (Wikidata's date for the domain), each counted from its first year. Hover a year.
The domains came first. A country code such as .ch or .jp is delegated to a national registry, and most of the countries that had websites early already had one: the United States' .us dates from February 1985 in Wikidata, and 46 country domains existed by the end of 1990. For the 12 countries in the list, the first recorded website came a median of 6 years after the country's domain (only Luxembourg's came first, by Wikidata's dates). The domains themselves kept spreading through the decade, peaking at 33 new ones in 1997; 223 existed by 2000. Switch the map to "Country code domain" to watch them.
The earliest recorded website in each country
83 countries, in order. Source: the pre-1995 list, or the earliest Wikidata website from 1993 on. Marked ?: dated before the country had its own domain, so probably the founding of the organisation, not its website. Click a row to see it on the map.
Wikidata lists 3,127 websites with a founding date ("inception") up to 2000. Many of those dates cannot be the date a website went up: 915 come before 1990, such as the Buenos Aires Herald, founded as a newspaper in 1876. I treat those as the founding of the organisation and leave them out. That leaves 2,208 websites founded from 1990 to 2000. Their number rises from 104 in 1994 to 191 in 1995 and peaks at 438 in 1999; 86% date from 1995 or later.
Wikidata websites founded each year, by region
Websites with an inception from 1990 to 2000, by the country Wikidata gives (or the country of their headquarters). Grey: no country recorded. Hover a bar.
Even after 1990 the dates need care. Wikidata has 139 websites founded from 1990 to 1992, more than twice the fifty to sixty sites that existed in the whole world at the end of 1992. Many are newspapers, societies and agencies whose founding date has been copied to their website. That is why the map and the country table use Wikidata dates only from 1993 on, and why even those are "earliest recorded", not proof. Coverage is thin, too: only 59% of these websites have a country in Wikidata and 26% a headquarters location that can be mapped.
The United States, Europe and the rest
Share of each year's websites by region. Lines: Wikidata websites with a known country. Squares: the pre-1995 list (1991 to 1994). Hover a year.
The two sources disagree about the shape of the early web, and both are biased. In the list the United States holds a majority of the sites with a known country from 1992 on (78% in 1994). In Wikidata its share swings between 13% and 46% from year to year, because the numbers are small, and averages 27% for 1990 to 1994 and 29% for 1995 to 2000. If I add the 127 sites without a country whose own address ends in a country code (.pl, .de, .ru...), the American share falls to 26%. American sites mostly used .com, so the websites with no recorded country are probably more American than the rest, and the true share is likely higher than Wikidata's figure, but nothing in the data says by how much.
Wikipedia's list of websites founded before 1995
With my coding of country, kind and status. Click a row to see it on the map; the name links to the list's entry.
The list. Wikipedia's "List of websites founded before 1995" is prose, not a table: a heading for each year from 1991 to 1994 and a short paragraph for each website. I split it into its 120 entries; Chabad.org appears under both 1993 and 1994 and I count it once, in 1993. The year is the section the entry sits in, although one entry (Wired) says itself that it launched later, and the list puts CERN in 1991 while its sister article "History of the World Wide Web" dates info.cern.ch to 20 December 1990, which the map follows. The country, place and kind of each website are my reading of its paragraph: where the text names a place (a university, a laboratory, a city) I use it (42 entries); otherwise I use the well-known home of the organisation behind it (49), or the country alone (15); 13 give no clue and have no country. Status counts only what the text says, checked phrase by phrase.
Wikidata. Every item that is an instance of website, or of a kind of website, with an inception up to 2000: 3,127 items. An item's country is the country containing its headquarters coordinates where Wikidata has them, otherwise the country Wikidata gives. Inceptions before 1990 are the founding of the organisation behind the site and are not counted as web dates; four Usenet newsgroups typed as websites are left out. For the earliest website in a country, Wikidata dates count only from 1993, because the 1990 to 1992 dates are mostly organisations' founding years. Europe means Natural Earth's continent, so it includes Russia.
Domains. Wikidata's inception date for each two-letter country code top-level domain, matched to countries by the code (235 with a date). Wikipedia's ccTLD table gives a year (or "1990+") for only 46 of 267 two-letter codes; where both exist they agree for 30 of 33. For the flag on doubtful dates, a country's domain includes its predecessor (.su for the former Soviet states, .yu for Serbia, .cs for the Czech Republic and Slovakia, .an for Curaçao).
What this is not. A census. The list covers about 4% of the 2,879 websites it says were set up before 1995, chosen because they survive or mattered. Wikidata has only what its editors have added. "First recorded" means first in these sources: the first website Wikidata happens to record for a country need not be its first, and some countries' first record is a newspaper whose founding year has been copied to its website.