There is a page that is more than 30 years old and can still be visited: info.cern.ch. It is the first web page that ever existed, and it explained what the World Wide Web was and how to use it.
Who created it and why
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), had a concrete problem: researchers used different computers and could not easily share documents. His solution was a system of pages linked to each other and accessible from any machine: the World Wide Web.
He did not invent cables or the Internet. He defined the logic that lets devices understand each other, with three pieces we still use today:
- URL: the address of each page.
- HTTP: the protocol used to request and send pages.
- HTML: the language pages are built with.
The Steve Jobs connection
That first website was built on a NeXT computer, the company Steve Jobs founded in 1985 after leaving Apple following an internal dispute. In 1997 Apple bought NeXT, and its operating system (NeXTSTEP) is the foundation of macOS, iOS, watchOS and iPadOS: the iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad and the rest of the ecosystem.
Why it matters if you want to sell online
Everything you use today to be present online (your store, your website, your marketplace) rests on that 1990 idea. Understanding the fundamentals helps you decide better.
What comes next in this series
- What a CMS is and which ones exist (WooCommerce, Tienda Nube, Empretienda, Shopify, Wix, PrestaShop, Magento).
- What a marketplace is (Mercado Libre, Amazon, eBay, Walmart).
- The differences between both models and which one suits you.