For most people, in 1990, the World Wide Web was something they might have read about or it was simply something that passed them by. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that Internet cafes began appearing (charging at relatively high rates for 20 minutes of slow-going surfing) and the odd-web equipped computer appeared in schools and colleges. The home market in dial-up web services began to become commonplace in the late 1990s.
As to what the web was like in 1990 the opportunity has arisen for everyone to find out, thanks to a team at CERN, who have rebuilt the original 1990 WorldWideWeb browser, according to Engadget. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known for attempting to discover the particles described by theoretical physicists.
CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web. The ‘web’ is an information space where documents and other resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (or URLs), which can be interlinked by hypertext links. These resources, typically in the form of pages, are accessible via the Internet. There’s a difference between the ‘web’ and the Internet. The Internet is a global network of computers; the World Wide Web is a collection of web pages following the http protocol that can be accessed via the Internet from any part of the world.
The World Wide Web was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, who has a vision of a global hyperlinked information system. This became a possibility by the second half of the 1980s. Working with Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee published a formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a “Hypertext project” called “WorldWideWeb” (at the time, this was all one word).
If you wish to experience a slow-moving page of (mainly) text and more cumbersome process of double clicking on embedded hyperlinks, then scientists at CERN have lovingly recreated the experience. The web 1990s style has been placed inside a modern browser.
