Technology · 2

Which early web protocol allowed visitors to the first CERN website in 1991 to learn about the WWW project by reading a document titled 'WorldWideWeb: Summary'?

Answer

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)

Tim Berners-Lee's first website at info.cern.ch used HTTP — the protocol he defined alongside HTML — to serve the foundational document explaining the World Wide Web project to the public. HTTP/0.9, the original version, was an extremely simple one-line request protocol capable only of fetching HTML pages.

💡 Did you know?

The very first web page ever published, at info.cern.ch, is still live today — CERN restored it in 2013 to its original 1992 address as a digital heritage project.

Other options people guess

  • FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
  • SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
  • Telnet

Topics

  • 1990s
  • world-wide-web
  • cern
  • web-history
  • protocols

Know your technology trivia?

Play a free Technology quiz and see how many you get right — no signup needed to start.

More Technology facts

Technology

Which protocol, introduced alongside the early web, used port 70 and preceded HTTP as the dominant way to navigate structured text documents across the internet?

Gopher was so popular in the early 1990s that some universities seriously debated whether it — not the Web — would become the internet's dominant interface.

Technology

What distinctive two-tone color scheme did the original CERN website use when the World Wide Web first opened to the public in 1991?

The first website ever published — CERN's info.cern.ch — had no images at all; every page was pure hyperlinked text, yet it described a system that would eventually carry billions of images daily.

Technology

In what month and year did CERN officially make the World Wide Web technology freely available to the public, marking its open release?

CERN's decision to release the Web royalty-free in 1993 was not guaranteed — the alternative was licensing it commercially, which could have fragmented the early internet entirely.

Technology

Which web browser, released in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, became the first widely popular graphical browser and helped bring the web to everyday users?

Mosaic was so influential that the U.S. Congress credited it with 'transforming the internet from a government tool into a global public network' in a 1994 resolution.

Technology

NASA's Mariner 1 probe, destroyed by a coding error shortly after its 1962 launch, had been aimed at which planet?

A single misplaced hyphen in Mariner 1's guidance code in 1962 caused a $18.5 million Venus probe to explode 293 seconds after launch.

Technology

GeoCities organized its millions of user homepages into themed 'neighborhoods' based on content type. Which of these was an actual GeoCities neighborhood dedicated to technology and computing topics?

GeoCities divided the web into themed neighborhoods (SiliconValley, Broadway, etc.), making 38 million user homepages feel like a digital city before Yahoo deleted it all in 2009.